Supreme Court Abets Trump’s Defiance of Court Orders

INSIDE: What's next for DOGE … the Dobbs anniversary … the misadventures of Kash Patel

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

As Josh Kovensky reported yesterday, the Supreme Court’s order pausing a preliminary injunction against Trump’s policy of third-country removals without due process will undoubtedly fire up his brutal deportation machine, and embolden administration officials to continue to flout court orders restraining it.

The case, Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., involves a challenge to the Trump administration policy directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to round up noncitizens the government previously was unable to deport to their home country, and then remove them to a third country without warning, due process, or consideration of the conditions they might face there. The preliminary injunction in the case, which the administration evaded and defied on several occasions, required the government to provide plaintiffs with notice and time to challenge their removal.

Shockingly, the Supreme Court stayed that injunction pending final resolution of the case, offering the administration carte blanche to continue third-country removals in the meantime. Worse, it gave the administration a very big cookie by pausing a court order that the administration already had defied.

Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic has a detailed, maddening account of each step of the government’s “legalistic noncompliance” with court orders in this and similar immigration cases, which involves “delaying implementation of court orders, adopting hyper-technical interpretations of judicial rulings in order to engineer loopholes, and asserting ignorance and confusion whenever something goes wrong.” D.V.D., she notes, “stands out as a chronicle of noncompliance from the very beginning—a cascade of sloppiness and calculated misunderstandings on the government’s part that has resulted in potentially serious danger for a gay Guatemalan man removed from the United States, along with the continued detention of eight men at a U.S. military base in Djibouti.”

The ruling is “disastrous,” according to legal scholar Steve Vladek. “For the Court to not only grant emergency relief in this case, but to offer nary a word of explanation either in criticism of the government’s behavior, or in defense of why it granted relief notwithstanding that behavior, is to invite—if not affirmatively enable—comparable defiance of future district court orders by the government.”

Contempt Watch: Judge in VOA Case Holds Show Case Hearing

After the Trump administration attempted to fire remaining Voice of America (VOA) staffers en masse on Friday, the judge in the pending case challenging the evisceration of the agency, Royce Lamberth, ordered the parties to appear in court yesterday. Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, had issued a preliminary injunction against the U.S. Agency for Global Media, and VOA’s parent agency, in April, finding “defendants are likely in violation of numerous federal laws” in their quest to slash the news service, mostly by terminating virtually all of its journalists.

When Lamberth asked the government’s counsel, Brenda Gonzalez Horowitz, why he had not been notified of Friday’s layoff letters, she protested that they had been complying “in good faith” with his April order. “I don’t think so,” was his reply, before ordering the government to file an update on how it is complying with the injunction by Friday.

On Dobbs Anniversary, Christian Right Takes Aim at Mifepristone

To commemorate today’s anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, the Christian right is pressing the Trump administration to restrict use of the abortion pill mifepristone. As part of a “day of fasting and prayer for life” hosted by the Family Research Council, the organization urges followers to “Pray for the Food and Drug Administration [FDA] to revoke the dangerous policy of the Biden administration regarding mifepristone and chemical abortion regulations, and to reinstate safety standards that prioritize the health and safety of mothers and their unborn children.” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has asked the FDA to review mifepristone’s safety, following the unscientific claims of Christian right organizations opposed to abortion.

“A Whiff of Fascism” in the Washington Post

Yesterday the Washington Post published an op-ed by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, giving her space to expound on her ongoing commitment to barring foreign students from Harvard. Her opening paragraph baselessly charged that “school leadership has not complied with the Department of Homeland Security’s lawful oversight duties, has fostered antisemitic extremism and used taxpayer money to collaborate with an American adversary.” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, co-author of “How Democracies Die,” called the piece “extraordinarily authoritarian” and a “whiff of fascism.” Noem’s concluding sentence proves Levitsky’s point. “Harvard must decide whether it wishes to be a partner to the United States,” Noem wrote, “or an adversary to American values.”

Last night, a federal judge in Boston, Allison Burroughs, blocked Trump administration efforts to bar foreign students from Harvard for the second time in a week.

Smashmouth Judge?

Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold confirmation hearings on Trump’s nomination of his former personal attorney, Emil Bove, to the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. As Trump’s acting Deputy Attorney General, Bove was notoriously at the center of the corrupt withdrawal of the federal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Justice Connection, a group of Department of Justice alumni, has also released a scathing video explaining why Bove is wildly unqualified for the bench.

An account by a DOJ attorney fired by the Trump administration, Erez Reuveni, provides even more damning details. According to Reuveni’s account, Bove openly pressed for the government to violate court orders in immigration cases. “Bove stated that D.O.J. would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order,” Reuveni revealed in a document submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the DOJ Inspector General yesterday, the New York Times reports.

Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board questions Bove’s fitness for a lifetime appointment, writing that “his reputation lately is as a smashmouth partisan who wields the law as a weapon.”

DOGE Actually Has Cost Us Money

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has tallied just some of the cost of the assault on our federal government by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). It found DOGE cuts to medical research “could amount to an estimated $10 billion loss in economic activity, and a loss of approximately 44,000 jobs a year;” that U.S.-based organizations contracting with the U.S. Agency for International Development lost $28.9 billion in funding; and that $500 billion will be lost to the Internal Revenue Service owing to DOGE’s elimination of staff and programs there. These figures are just the tip of the iceberg, and do not include DOGE’s assaults on other agencies. Nor can we compute other kinds of losses, including America’s international soft power, the public’s trust in government, and countless non-monetary societal benefits accruing from a functional government staffed by nonpartisan experts in their fields.

What’s Next for DOGE?

The New Yorker’s Charles Bethea offers a look at Joe Gebbia, thought to be a possible successor to Elon Musk as head of DOGE. Bethea’s doozy of a lede contains most of what you probably need to know:

Who will help lead the Department of Government Efficiency now that Elon Musk has left the scene? News reports have mentioned Joe Gebbia, a Tesla board member and a co-founder of Airbnb, as a possible replacement. Gebbia is forty-three. Like Musk—his close friend—he is a billionaire, a resident of Austin, Texas, and the rumored recipient of a hair transplant. Gebbia formally announced his political conversion on X in January, posting that, after years of supporting Democrats, he finally “did [his] own research” and concluded that Donald Trump “deeply cares about our nation.” His feed has a MAHA flavor: Big Food exposés (“The truth about Ketchup”) alternate with digs at liberals suffering from “TDS,” or Trump Derangement Syndrome.

With or without Gebbia at the helm, DOGE continues to be a danger to democracy, health and safety, privacy, the civil service system, checks and balances–you know, everything.

Speaker Johnson Dismisses Invoking War Powers Act

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has never met a Trump action he didn’t like, brushed off questions from reporters about whether he would bring a bipartisan resolution, co-sponsored by California Democrat Ro Khanna and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie, to require Trump to seek Congressional approval for further military intervention in Iran. (Trump purported to expel Massie from the MAGA movement over his co-sponsorship of the measure, calling him a “pathetic LOSER.”) “It’s all politics,” Johnson said, his characteristic diversionary tactic. “This is not a time for politics.” Or, apparently, as ever, congressional oversight.

Good Advice

Media critic Mark Jacob offers eight suggestions for the media to avoid turning war with Iran into the sort of entertainment loop Trump craves.

The Misadventures of Kash Patel

Mother Jones reporter Anna Merlan digs into all the bogus investigations FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino have promised, but never delivered on. The piece is filled with eye-rolling details of all the ridiculous conspiracies that Trumpland chases, hoping to feed the base’s voracious appetite for new diabolical content about their perceived enemies, from Joe Biden to James Comey to the Chinese Communist Party. But for Patel and Bongino, who have their positions precisely because of their proximity to that world, there’s a serious catch:

Today, with the conspiracy world full of ever more competing storylines, theories, and hoped-for outcomes, the idea of disclosure remains a singular focal point of longing; that someone high up, somewhere, will finally tell us what we are desperate to know. Against that backdrop, Bongino, Patel, and other Trump figures are still awkwardly trying to transition from demanding to know the truth to being the people in a position to provide it.

In the meantime, Bongino and other Trump figures are continuing to create content by churning out endless tweets, sending performatively verbose press releases, and making appearances on partisan news channels, all aimed at heightening their own profile and shifting blame from anything they have not yet achieved. Where before they cast themselves as independent investigators calling on a shadowy government to reveal its secrets, now they’re forced to play new roles, as dedicated and diligent public servants. This is, of course, boring: “I gave up everything for this,” Bongino lamented recently on Fox & Friends.

Of course, as with all things Trump, the absurdity is part of the point. And, as always, that does not at all diminish how radically dangerous it is for this to be the conduct of the director of the FBI.

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