Trump says communism greater threat than WWI, WWII, 9/11, and Pearl Harbor
Center Right
President Donald Trump compared the rise of socialism to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Trump was asked about the possible rise of more socialist candidates after three candidates New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed last week won their Democratic primary elections. “It’s a big threat to our nation, actually, because it’s not socialism, it’s […]
CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel didn't sugarcoat President Donald Trump's Supreme Court setback, tracing it straight back to his refusal to accept the 2020 election.The court ruled 5-4 Monday in Watson v. Republican National Committee that states may count mail ballots postmarked by Election Day even if they arrive afterward, rejecting an RNC challenge Trump's Justice Department had backed. Trump called it a "tremendous loss."Gangel agreed it was a loss, but said Trump brought it on himself."So, is this a loss for President Trump? Yes," she said. "But big picture, he's obsessed with this. It is sort of a loss of his own making, because the underlying problem here is he doesn't want to admit he lost in 2020, so he's looking for fraud and corruption where there isn't."She noted the practice isn't partisan — Trump himself has voted by mail — and said it's "not about corruption or fraud."Gangel said his fixation is holding up a major bipartisan housing bill aimed at reining in costs, which she said had reached his desk, but that he won't sign it because he's so focused on curbing mail voting and passing his stalled election overhaul, the SAVE Act.In the Oval Office moments earlier, Trump said the housing bill "hasn't been sent to me yet" but was "coming." Next to his voting bill, he said, "just about everything is a big yawn."The decision set off fury among MAGA allies and came as the justices also turned away his E. Jean Carroll appeal.Former Trump aide Hogan Gidley pushed back, calling the housing measure "a political win" the president would "take a victory lap" on.
Today, Bloomberg's Mike McKee and June Grasso break down the Supreme Court's decision to allow Fed governor Lisa Cook to stay in her role while she fights President Trump's efforts to oust her. Then, former Governor of Indiana Eric Holcomb discusses RAISE US, a joint effort with former Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo that aims to develop a strategy around AI's impact on the labor market. Plus, Kikoff CEO Cynthia Chen, breaks down how her app helps consumers build credit and improve low credit scores. (Source: Bloomberg)
The Supreme Court blocked Trump’s bid to remove the Fed’s Lisa Cook for now but expanded his power over other agencies. Hear what the rulings mean for the Fed’s future on the Big Take podcast. (Source: Bloomberg)
There was good news and bad news from the Supreme Court on Monday. We’ll start with the former. In an extraordinary 5-4 ruling in Trump v. Cook, the court held that President Donald Trump cannot summarily fire a Federal Reserve governor without cause, thereby shielding the nation’s central bank from direct presidential control.Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote for the court, held that Congress could lawfully shield Federal Reserve members from removal without cause because of the Fed’s unique role in American governance. In doing so, he and the other justices in the majority—Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal members—sidestepped some of the court’s normal procedural hurdles.“We see no reason to leave the public in limbo, or to sow doubt as to the status of one of our nation’s (and the world’s) most important financial institutions,” he explained in his majority opinion, quoting from precedent. “Although we appreciate that others may see matters differently, we would not so quickly unsettle this ‘special arrangement sanctioned by history.’”Unfortunately, the court’s deference to Congress on removal protections applies only to the Federal Reserve. The court’s conservative majority simultaneously held that Trump could fire Democratic appointees at the Federal Trade Commission in Trump v. Slaughter, clearing the path for him to wield much greater influence over other financial regulatory agencies.The 6-3 decision is a generational victory for the conservative legal movement, which has spent the last few decades trying to bring independent federal agencies under the heel of Republican presidents. The high court also overturned a New Deal-era precedent that allowed Congress to protect the leaders of federal financial regulators from dismissal without cause in Slaughter. In doing so, it opened some of the nation’s most important governing institutions to the day-to-day whims of a corrupt president.Taken together, Cook and Slaughter divided the Supreme Court into three camps. One of them, represented by the court’s three liberal justices, would have upheld the status quo for independent federal agencies. In their view, Congress can give certain federal agencies a measure of independence from the White House by only allowing the president to fire the agencies’ leaders for cause.This also happened to be the status quo for at least the last century of American history. In 1935, the Supreme Court ruled in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that the president could not lawfully remove a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Prior to Slaughter, no president had sought to dismiss a FTC commissioner, either for cause or without it.While presidents have the power to remove executive-branch officers by default, the Humphrey’s Executor court reasoned, Congress could impose limits if the agency in question also exercised “quasi-legislative” or “quasi-judicial” power. Agency independence became particularly important with financial regulators as a check on corruption and safeguard of public confidence.“Congress and more than a dozen Presidents have relied on Humphrey’s to construct a workable government, creating many other agencies in the FTC’s tradition,” Sotomayor explained in her Cook dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong.”Last year, Trump began to challenge Humphrey’s Executor by firing the heads of certain federal agencies without cause. The president had long sought to exercise more direct control over federal agencies, though he lacked the interest or drive to do so during his first term. After his return to power last year, Trump ended the Justice Department’s post-Watergate tradition of independence, staffed other agencies with personal loyalists, and sought to remove Democratic appointees of multi-member regulatory agencies.The Supreme Court proved eager to help him wage this war against what conservatives had long derided as the “administrative state.” The justices effectively signaled that Humphrey’s Executor was a dead letter in a shadow-docket ruling in Wilcox v. Trump. (The court also addressed the Federal Reserve in that case, but we’ll come back to that later.)Technically, however, that ruling remained the law of the land when Trump dismissed FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter last year. Slaughter challenged her dismissal in federal court, noting that Congress had insulated commissioners like herself from presidential removal without cause and that Humphrey’s Executor remained good law.
The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a loss on Monday in siding against his party on voting, refusing to overturn state laws that allow mail ballots that arrive after Election Day to be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election Day. But they might simultaneously have given Trump the tools to punch a hole in the right to vote by mail anyway.That's because they also released their long-awaited decision in Trump v. Slaughter, overturning nearly a century of precedent to determine the president can fire members of independent agencies without cause.According to White House correspondent Jacob Bogage, one of the many federal entities that could be impacted by Trump's newfound powers to clean house would be one with critical implications for mail-in ballots — effectively giving him a bunch of the control he was hoping to get out of the ruling that didn't go his way."This also has big potential mail-in voting consequences," he wrote. "It could empower the president to fire members of the USPS board of governors, the group that selects the postmaster general and overseas the U.S. mail system."This comes as the current postmaster general, David Steiner, is already going all-in on a controversial Trump executive order that would direct the Postal Service not to deliver mail ballots at all in states that don't hand over sensitive information about voter practices to the federal government.A federal judge in Boston has already moved to block the enforcement of that executive order, but litigation is certain to continue in the case.
