Category: Talking Points Memo

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. The pain jolted me awake. It was barely dawn, a misty February morning in 2023. My […]

This article first appeared at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. When top Trump adviser Stephen Miller threatened on May 9 that the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus in response to an “invasion” from undocumented immigrants, […]

More than two months after the Trump administration flew more than 200 people to a detention camp in El Salvador, there’s still a lot that remains unclear.

Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️ The fired head of the U.S. Copyright Office is fighting back against the Trump administration’s recent attempt to seize control of the Library of Congress, which, as the name suggests, is a legislative branch agency. As TPM has reported, Democrats in the House have already taken […]

U.S. District Judge John Bates of Washington, D.C. just awarded summary judgment to Jenner & Block, finding President Trump’s executive order against it unlawful and declaring it null and void. This is remarkably strong language from a George W. Bush appointee who served on Special Counsel Ken Starr’s team:

What interests me most about the Supreme Court’s telegraphed decision ending independent agencies is the ease with which they discard their governing theories (unitary executive) when the results are ones they find unpleasant (ending the independence Federal Reserve). Let’s make a note in passing that as long as they were going to make this disastrous […]

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss the House passage of the “big, beautiful bill” of health care cuts and analyze the big “what happened” report of the 2024 election.

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. The Biggest News Of The Week In a tumultuous week that marked four months since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, nothing will have as long-lasting and damaging an effect on American democracy as the Supreme Court’s […]

DHS seems to have pissed off a federal judge in one of the many ongoing litigations around gutting much of the federal government. This one is brought – ironically – by Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights against DHS and is about DHS shutting down several statute-mandated offices that provide oversight of the treatment of people […]

The independent agency embedded within the legislative branch that is designed to review federal spending and make recommendations to Congress on cost savings and waste, as well as investigate policy implementation (the real one, not DOGE), has released a new finding that none of us will find surprising.

The Supreme Court majority all but declared Thursday that it is ready to overturn a nearly century-old precedent meant to protect independent agencies from at-will firing by the President. 

Idaho pastor Douglas Wilson can be provocative. He once wrote that “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races.” He’s said that “sodomy” is worse than “slavery”; abortion, he’s written, is “as great an evil as slavery” due to what he sees as its ability to spark a civil war. He told […]

After weeks of intraparty fighting, House Republicans passed the reconciliation package that addresses President Donald Trump’s fiscal agenda in a largely party line 215-214 vote early Thursday morning.

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. An Essential Prism For Our Time Before jumping into the day’s news, I want to elevate another prism through which to examine the Trump II presidency: white Christian nationalism. By now I’m sure it’s obvious […]

A federal judge tore into federal prosecutors on Wednesday over the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office’s bizarre handling of the arrest of Democratic Newark Mayor Ras Baraka earlier this month. The judge also reminded prosecutors that the goals of the DOJ’s work should not involve efforts to “advance political agendas.”

The Trump administration sent a planeload of detainees to South Sudan on Tuesday, according to the detainees’ lawyers, allegedly violating a clear court order to provide people sent to third countries with notice and time to challenge their removal.

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. ‘This Seems Like It May Be Contempt’ Morning Memo has been carefully tracking where the constitutional clash between President Trump and the judicial branch is most likely to reach its apex first. There’s a new […]

The Catalist report is in, the big “what happened” packet interpreting the 2024 election through voting results and voter files, census data and modeling from the Democratic firm that election-studiers anticipate every cycle as soon as the last vote is cast.  This year’s headline: Men, especially young men, swung hard to the right. 

DHS is violating a court order to remove a group of detainees to South Sudan, lawyers told a federal judge on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump attended the closed-door House Republican conference meeting Tuesday morning in an attempt to convince two obstinate factions to get on board with the party’s reconciliation package. One group of members has been calling for steeper spending cuts; another group of largely blue-state Republicans has been unhappy with leadership’s state and local tax […]