Politics Random, Random

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[ashkor87]

where were they in November?

[Owendonovan]

They were there.

[patrick]

President Biden warned people to take their country back in his last speech before he left as he said the current administration wants to take USA out of democracy

[ashkor87]

They were there.

and voted for Trump?

[Owendonovan]

They were there.

and voted for Trump?

Not likely, I would say trump voters represented less than 1% of the folks protesting.

[ashkor87]

They were there.

and voted for Trump?

Not likely, I would say trump voters represented less than 1% of the folks protesting.

probably you are right but then, what is the use of protesting? these folks were on the losing side

[Owendonovan]

To express dissatisfaction with hopes of change.

[ponchi101]

and voted for Trump?

Not likely, I would say trump voters represented less than 1% of the folks protesting.

probably you are right but then, what is the use of protesting? these folks were on the losing side

It is what the Dems did not, and maybe still don't, understand.
The Trump voters are silent voters. They made up their mind years ago, after Jan 6th. They decided that they would not talk about their approval of that day, but would vote for Tiny regardless of anything he would do or say. They stayed in their ideological silo, the TV locked on Fox News, and simply went and voted for Tiny this last November.
Go do all the protests you want. Unless you get a significant portion of that 36% that decided that voting against this buffoon was not important and stayed home instead to take the electoral process seriously, he gets to stay as president.
And let's see what happens when in 2028 he decides the constitution is a joke (as he already has) and gets on the ticket anyway. And the same 77MM will go and vote for him again.

[ti-amie]

The Constitutional Crisis Is Here
The Supreme Court told the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison. So far, the administration is pretending to comply while refusing to do so.

By Adam Serwer


Pool Photo / AP

April 14, 2025, 2:10 PM ET

Between the path of outright defiance of the Supreme Court and following its order to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador’s infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), the Trump administration has chosen a third way: pretending it is complying while refusing to do so.

During an on-camera Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whom the Trump administration has paid to imprison immigrants deported from the United States it claims without evidence are gang members, President Donald Trump deferred to Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said the decision was Bukele’s.

“That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us,” Bondi told reporters. “That’s not up to us. If they want to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.” Bukele, for his part, called Abrego Garcia a “terrorist,” saying to a reporter who asked if he would return him, “I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States.” He added, “The question is preposterous.”

The bad faith of this exchange is obvious. Bukele has the power to free Abrego Garcia and send him back to the U.S. on an American plane without “smuggling” anyone or anything. But neither side wants that outcome, and so they are both pretending that it’s the other’s responsibility. It’s a game both sides are in on.

Last week, the Supreme Court instructed the Trump administration to follow a lower court’s directive to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Born in El Salvador, Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. illegally but was under a protective order from a judge who found that he had a reasonable fear of persecution from gangs if he returned to his home country.

The evidence that Abrego Garcia is a “gang member” or a “terrorist” is negligible. Since coming to the U.S. in 2011 when he was 16 years old, Abrego Garcia has married a U.S. citizen, had an American child, and maintained steady employment. But on March 15, he was sent to the Salvadoran prison without due process as part of the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” program, along with hundreds of other men, 90 percent of whom also have no criminal record. The only support for the idea that Garcia is a gang member is tenuous—he was identified as such by an anonymous informant in a 2019 immigration proceeding but has had no trouble with the law since. Like most of the men rendered to CECOT, Abrego Garcia has fewer criminal convictions than the current president of the United States. Even the Trump administration acknowledged in federal court that it had deported Abrego Garcia “in error.”

This morning, however, Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller claimed on Fox News that the acknowledgment that Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported had been made by a “saboteur” in the Department of Justice and that “he was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador”; he added that “this was the right person sent to the right place.” This is a lie—the admission of error was made by an ICE official in a court filing.

Since last week’s Supreme Court directive, Trump officials have harped on a line stating that the lower court should clarify its “directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” Officials including Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have interpreted that to mean that they do not have to follow the order at all. During the Oval Office meeting, Rubio chimed in to say that “no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.”

In other words, the administration is following the Supreme Court’s ruling by ignoring it completely.

This rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law. The administration is maintaining that it has the power to send armed agents of the state to grab someone off the street and then, without a shred of due process, deport them to a Gulag in a foreign country and leave them there forever. The crucial point here is that the administration’s logic means that it could do the same to American citizens—after all, if deporting someone under a protective order to a Gulag without so much as a hearing is a “foreign policy” matter with which no court may interfere, then the citizenship of the condemned person doesn’t matter.

Trump is already contemplating the possibility of deporting citizens. Aside from numerous public statements to that effect, Trump told Bukele, in an exchange posted on Bukele’s X feed, “Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places.” Loud laughter filled the Oval Office.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... XWpbB8kiu0

[dryrunguy]

This is alarming. That said, I would not mind seeing a list of the $2.2 billion in grants the richest university in the United States with an endowment of $52 billion is receiving from the federal government.

Trump Administration Will Freeze $2 Billion After Harvard Refuses Demands

Federal officials said they would freeze the money after Harvard said it would not submit to requests to overhaul hiring and report international students who break rules.
By Vimal Patel
April 14, 2025
Updated 8:41 p.m. ET

::

The Trump administration acted quickly on Monday to punish Harvard University after it refused to comply with a list of demands from the federal government that the school said were too onerous.

On Monday afternoon, Harvard became the first university to refuse to comply with the administration’s requirements, setting up a showdown between the federal government and the nation’s wealthiest university. By the evening, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to Harvard, along with a $60 million contract.

Other universities have pushed back against the administration’s interference in higher education. But Harvard’s response, which called the Trump administration’s demands illegal, marked a major shift in tone for the nation’s most influential school, which has been criticized in recent weeks for capitulating to Trump administration pressure.

A letter the Trump administration sent to Harvard on Friday demanded that the university reduce the power of students and faculty members over the university’s affairs; report foreign students who commit conduct violations immediately to federal authorities; and bring in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is “viewpoint diverse,” among other steps. The administration did not define what it meant by viewpoint diversity, but it has generally referred to seeking a range of political views, including conservative perspectives.

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” said Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, in a statement to the university on Monday.

Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has aggressively targeted universities, saying it is investigating dozens of schools as it moves to eradicate diversity efforts and what it says is rampant antisemitism on campus. Officials have suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds for research at universities across the country.

The administration has taken a particular interest in a short list of the nation’s most prominent schools. Officials have discussed toppling a high-profile university as part of their campaign to remake higher education. They took aim first at Columbia University, then at other members of the Ivy League, including Harvard. The announcement of the funding freeze was issued by members of a federal antisemitism task force that has been behind much of the effort to target schools.

“Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges,” said a statement from the task force, posted by the General Services Administration.

Harvard, for its part, has been under intense pressure from its own students and faculty to be more forceful in resisting the Trump administration’s encroachment on the university and on higher education more broadly.

The Trump administration said in March that it was examining about $256 million in federal contracts for Harvard, and an additional $8.7 billion in what it described as “multiyear grant commitments.” The announcement went on to suggest that Harvard had not done enough to curb antisemitism on campus. At the time, it was vague about what the university could do to satisfy Trump administration concerns.

Last month, more than 800 faculty members at Harvard signed a letter urging the university to “mount a coordinated opposition to these anti-democratic attacks.”

The university appeared to take a step in that direction on Monday. In his letter rejecting the administration’s demands, Dr. Garber suggested that Harvard had little alternative.

“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” he wrote. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

The government’s letter to Harvard on Friday demanded an extraordinary set of changes that would have reshaped the university and ceded an unprecedented degree of control over Harvard’s operations to the federal government. The changes would have violated principles that are held dear on colleges campuses, including academic freedom.

Some of the actions that the Trump administration demanded of Harvard were:

Conducting plagiarism checks on all current and prospective faculty members.

Sharing all its hiring data with the Trump administration, and subjecting itself to audits of its hiring while “reforms are being implemented,” at least through 2028.

Providing all admissions data to the federal government, including information on both rejected and admitted applicants, sorted by race, national origin, grade-point average and performance on standardized tests.

Immediately shutting down any programming related to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Overhauling academic programs that the Trump administration says have “egregious records on antisemitism,” including placing certain departments and programs under an external audit. The list includes the Divinity School, the Graduate School of Education, the School of Public Health and the Medical School, among many others.

The demands suggested that the federal government wanted to intrude on processes that universities prefer to have control over, like how they admit their incoming classes. It also touched on issues that conservative activists have used as cudgels against academics. Plagiarism accusations, for example, are part of the reasons that Harvard’s former president, Claudine Gay, was forced to resign.

“Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” the Trump administration letter said.

Last month, after the Trump administration stripped $400 million in federal funds from Columbia University, Columbia agreed to major concessions demanded by the federal government. It agreed to place its Middle Eastern studies department under different oversight and to create a new security force of 36 “special officers” empowered to arrest and remove people from campus.

The demands on Harvard were different, and much more expansive, touching on many aspects of the university’s basic operations.

Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York who had questioned university leaders, including Dr. Gay, over allegations that they had tolerated antisemitism on campus, said that the Trump administration should “defund Harvard” for defying the federal government.

“It is time to totally cut off U.S. taxpayer funding to this institution,” she wrote in a social media post on Monday.

In Harvard’s response on Monday, it said it had already made major changes over the last 15 months to improve its campus climate and counter antisemitism, including disciplining students who violate university policies, devoting resources to programs that promote ideological diversity, and improving security.

Harvard said it was unfortunate that the administration had ignored the university’s efforts and moved instead to infringe on the school’s freedom in unlawful ways.

The forceful posture taken by Harvard on Monday was applauded across higher education, after universities had drawn widespread criticism for failing to resist Mr. Trump’s attacks more aggressively.

Harvard itself had been under fire for a series of moves in recent months that faculty members said were taken to placate Mr. Trump, including hiring a lobbying firm with close ties to the president and pushing out the faculty leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

A Harvard faculty group filed a lawsuit last week, seeking to block the administration from carrying out its threat to withdraw federal funding from the university. Nikolas Bowie, a law professor and secretary-treasurer of Harvard’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the group that filed the suit, applauded Harvard’s rejection of the Trump administration’s demands.

“I’m grateful for President Garber’s courage and leadership,” said Dr. Bowie. “His response recognizes that there’s no negotiating with extortion.”

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, which represents many colleges and universities in Washington, said Harvard’s approach could embolden other campus leaders, whom he said were “breathing a sigh of relief.”

“This gives more room for others to stand up, in part because if Harvard hadn’t, it would have said to everyone else, ‘You don’t stand a chance,’” said Dr. Mitchell, a former president of Occidental College. “This gives people a sense of the possible.”

He described Harvard’s response as “a road map for how institutions could oppose the administration on this incursion into institutional decision-making.” He added, “Whether it’s antisemitism or doing merit-based hiring or merit-based admissions, the basic texture of the academic enterprise needs to be decided by the university, not by the government.”

Ethan Kelly, 22, a senior at Harvard from Maryland, said that Monday’s message from Dr. Garber was a relief. He said that he and many of his classmates have been concerned that their school would cave to the Trump administration’s demands.

“There’s been so much concern that Harvard would fold under political pressure, especially with how aggressive the Trump administration has been in trying to control higher education,” Mr. Kelly said. Seeing Dr. Garber draw a clear line, he added, was something “that matters.”

In a related development, nine major research universities and three university associations sued the Trump administration on Monday to restore $400 million in funding that the Energy Department said it was slashing last week.

In a statement, Michael I. Kotlikoff, the president of Cornell University, one of the schools that joined the lawsuit, said the research at stake was “vital to national security, American manufacturing, economic competitiveness and progress toward energy independence.”

Other schools listed as plaintiffs were Brown University, Caltech, the University of Illinois, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, Michigan State, Princeton and the University of Rochester. The Energy Department said it would dramatically reduce overhead or “indirect” costs associated with the grants.

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When you give in to the bully they get worse. Yes Harvard has a large endowment and can afford to do this but someone/something has to say enough.

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‪Molly Jong-Fast‬ ‪@mollyjongfast.bsky.social‬
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Good for Harvard

[ti-amie]

Sen. Adam Schiff
‪@schiff.senate.gov‬
There’s a word for this, and it’s called bribery.