Free Republic

On March 11, about 50 judges gathered in Washington for the biannual meeting of the Judicial Conference, which oversees the administration of the federal courts. It was the first time the conference met since President Trump retook the White House.In the midst of discussions of staffing levels and long-range planning, the judges’ conversations were focused, to an unusual degree, on rising threats against judges and their security, said several people who attended the gathering.Behind closed doors at one session, Judge Richard J. Sullivan, the chairman of the conference’s Committee on Judicial Security, raised a scenario that weeks before would have...

PBS NEWSHOUR: New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart join William Brangham to discuss the week in politics, including President Trump's continued faceoff with the courts, if Republicans will begin pushing back against the president and Harvard rejecting Trump's demands. David Brooks, New York Times: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal. "The core argument is that Trump is really about amassing power," Brooks said of his column. "And anything that might potentially restrain his power, he will destroy. And that includes the court systems and anything part...

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services in February, he promised “radical transparency” and declared that “both science and democracy flourish from the free and unimpeded flow of information.” But when the Trump administration laid off thousands of employees on Tuesday, the targets included the very people who communicated the health department’s work to Americans....

Mike Howell was looking at his phone in an airport lounge this month when he saw a letter from the attorney general of Missouri questioning whether President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had the “mental capacity” to sign the pardons and executive orders he issued during his final months in office. Mr. Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project, a branch of the conservative Heritage Foundation, sensed an opportunity, he said in an interview. For months, he had been comparing Mr. Biden’s signature on dozens of official documents and noting that many of them appeared identical. Before boarding his flight, Mr....

The line fell silent. In a phone call from the Oval Office, President Trump had just delivered unwelcome news to three of America’s most powerful auto executives: Mary Barra of General Motors, John Elkann of Stellantis and Jim Farley of Ford. Everyone needs to buckle up, Mr. Trump said on the call, which took place in early March. Tariffs are going into effect on April 2. It’s time for everyone to get on board. The auto chiefs, like the leaders of other industries, had been arguing that Mr. Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on cars coming from Canada and Mexico would...

Organizations funded by the United States helped keep dangerous pathogens in check around the world. Now many safeguards are gone, and Americans may pay the price.Dangerous pathogens left unsecured at labs across Africa. Halted inspections for mpox, Ebola and other infections at airports and other checkpoints. Millions of unscreened animals shipped across borders. The Trump administration’s pause on foreign aid has hobbled programs that prevent and snuff out outbreaks around the world, scientists say, leaving people everywhere more vulnerable to dangerous pathogens. That includes Americans. Outbreaks that begin overseas can travel quickly: The coronavirus may have first appeared in China,...

A band of moderate Republicans in Congress sharply criticized the Trump administration this week for siding with Russia at the United Nations on resolutions regarding the war in Ukraine, even as the majority of the G.O.P. turned a blind eye to the United States’ sudden embrace of a longtime adversary.“The Trump Administration royally screwed up today on Ukraine,” Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, wrote on social media on Monday night. “The vast majority of Americans stand up for independence, freedom and free markets, and against the bully and invader.”The reproach from Mr. Bacon and others came after the United...

The forceful approach that Emil Bove III has taken toward the Southern District of New York underscores his own fraught relationship with the office that gave him the expertise to do so.Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general, stood stone-faced and alone at the prosecution table inside the federal courthouse in Manhattan last week to do a job his onetime colleagues in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York would not. Mr. Bove, who runs the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department under President Trump, was there to seek the dismissal of corruption charges against...

The president’s swift moves underscore the confidence of an administration with a much firmer grip on the levers of government than during his first term.The last time President Trump held office, he tried to make deep cuts to foreign aid, but was blocked by Congress. He is finding little resistance from fellow Republicans this time to his move to freeze such funding.During a special counsel’s inquiry in his first term, Mr. Trump expressed a desire to fire the investigator, but White House lawyers stopped him. This term, Mr. Trump has swiftly forced out a slew of federal officials who had...

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, speaking at a Florida college on Tuesday, made pointed remarks about the limits of presidential power and her fear that government officials might flout court decisions. “Our founders were hellbent on ensuring that we didn’t have a monarchy,” she said, “and the first way they thought of that was to give Congress the power of the purse.”

Government Accountability Office last year: “Data Show Federal Government Loses an Estimated $233 Billion to $521 Billion Annually to Fraud”

The top agent at the F.B.I.’s New York City field office vowed in a defiant email to his staff to “dig in” after the Trump administration targeted officials involved in the investigations into the Jan. 6 attack — and praised the bureau’s interim leaders for defending its independence.“Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy,” wrote James E. Dennehy, a veteran and highly-respected agent who has run...

The Democrats are a party controlled by elites, liberals and special interest groups. They are out of touch with America’s middle class. They are personified by a president who let inflation get the better of him and world events spin out of his control. As a result, the Democrats lost the White House as well as control of the Senate. I’m talking about the 1980 election and its aftermath. But if politics back then has a familiar ring, it also has lessons for Democrats today, as they are in dire need of fresh vision and leadership. The election of a...

The president made good on promises to seek revenge against enemies during his first week back in power, signaling in the process that anyone who crosses him in the future could also suffer.In his first week in office, President Trump made clear that his promises to exact revenge on his perceived enemies were not empty campaign pledges — and that his retribution is intended not just to impose punishment for the past but also to intimidate anyone who might cross him in the future.By removing security protections from former officials facing credible death threats, he signaled that he was willing...

It is easy for Alex Behr to gush about her son, Eli, whom she describes as a generous and thoughtful college junior who had a serious skateboarding phase. It is much harder for her to talk about his politics. Ms. Behr, 59, is a Democrat in Portland, Ore., who voted enthusiastically for Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election. She and her ex-husband were appalled that Eli, 20, decided to cast his first vote in a presidential election this fall for Donald J. Trump. When Eli brought a “Make America Great Again” hat home from college this summer, Ms....

No, the headline does not deceive you. The New York Times got its pants in a bunch over President Donald Trump daring to refer to violent Mexican drug cartels as “terrorists” because it could supposedly harm the economy. “How Labeling Cartels ‘Terrorists’ Could Hurt the U.S. Economy,” read the asinine January 22 news item from Times correspondents Maria Abi-Habib and Simon Romero. The authors railed against Trump’s executive order designating the cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” and claimed that it “could force some American companies to forgo doing business in Mexico rather than risk U.S. sanctions.” Yeah, how dare Trump...

Since his election victory, President Trump has said he would not seek retribution against his perceived enemies. “I’m not looking to go into the past,” he said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Retribution will be through success.”But in an executive order he signed on Monday night, Mr. Trump made clear that he has every intention to seek out and possibly punish government officials in the Justice Department and America’s intelligence agencies as a way to “correct past misconduct” against him and his supporters.It would be justice, the order said, against officials from the Biden administration who carried out...

The president’s Day 1 actions included directives that fly in the face of legal limits on involving the military in domestic operations and the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship.President Trump’s flurry of executive actions on immigration in the hours after taking office was the leading edge of an effort to roll back four years of policies put in place by the Biden administration and reimpose an agenda that would fundamentally upend the United States’ global role as a sanctuary for refugees and immigrants. In a series of orders he signed on Monday evening, Mr. Trump moved to seal the nation’s...

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has picked Brandon Williams, a former Navy officer and one-term member of Congress, to become the keeper of the nation’s arsenal of thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads. Trump’s selection is a shift from a tradition in which the people who served as administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration typically had deep technical roots or experience in the nation’s atomic complex. What’s unknown publicly is the extent of Williams’ experience in the knotty intricacies of how the weapons work and how they are kept reliable for decades without ever being ignited. Terry C. Wallace Jr.,...

In 2016, Thomas D. Homan was a frustrated immigration bureaucrat ready to call it quits. A former border patrol agent with a lawman’s steely demeanor, he had been an odd fit for the Obama administration. Top officials would call on him when they wanted a hard-liner’s take. But his proposals — including an early version of the controversial family separation policy to deter migrants — were often rejected. In the years since, Donald J. Trump’s rise has fully unleashed Mr. Homan and his ideas. In Mr. Trump’s first administration, Mr. Homan helped make the family separation policy a chaotic reality....