The Trump Administration’s Assault on Federal Courts Gets More Shockingly Authoritarian

INSIDE: Mike Johnson, phone home ... RFK Jr's vaccine crisis ... Trump's Bible profits

(Photo by ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

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Trump’s DOJ Just Sued Every Federal Judge in Maryland

It is really starting to look like Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is carrying out a completely unprecedented and coordinated vendetta to undermine the authority of federal district courts. In its latest move, the Department of Justice has sued every sitting judge in the United States District Court for the District of Maryland. Government attorneys are seeking to invalidate the court’s standing order ensuring an automatic two-day reprieve for immigrant detainees, an effort to preserve their due process rights from Trump’s rapid-fire deportation machine.

This extraordinary escalation is part of a growing pattern of overt defiance directed from the highest levels of the DOJ. At the confirmation hearing yesterday for top DOJ official Emil Bove to become an appellate judge, Republican senators appeared unbothered by the whistleblower account of Bove encouraging DOJ attorneys to say “fuck you” to district court judges. If confirmed, Bove will have a lifetime appointment to review and rule on the orders of the very district court judges for whom he has exhibited this disdain.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, too, the Trump administration is very much having its way with court orders. Stanford University political scientist Adam Bonica compiled data on the administration’s win/loss record in federal courts from May 1 through June 23. He found that in cases brought against its sprawling excesses the Trump administration has lost 94% of the time at the district court level. That’s a truly terrible litigation record. But at the Supreme Court, Bonica found, DOJ won 94% of the time.

“We are witnessing something without precedent,” Bonica wrote. “[A] Supreme Court that appears to be at war with the federal judiciary’s core constitutional function.”

Administration officials are well aware of how their Supreme Court allies have their back in this campaign to delegitimize the trial courts. “All these district courts throughout the country are tying our hands,” complained Attorney General Pam Bondi, under questioning from Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing yesterday. “And here’s how we will follow them—when we get to SCOTUS, we’re winning.”

The Looming Vaccine Crisis RFK Jr. Is Creating

Yesterday, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s panel of anti-vaccine cranks held its first meeting, at which it announced it would be reevaluating the existing schedule of childhood vaccinations. The ultimate decision of Kennedy’s handpicked Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) could upend the entire process by which infants, toddlers, and children receive vaccinations, including school requirements, insurance coverage, and federal programs for free shots administered to about half of America’s children.

That means, if you’re a parent who would rather your child not be sickened by eradicated, preventable, and potentially fatal diseases, you need to keep your eye on ACIP’s next moves. “Kennedy’s decision to replace ACIP wholesale and the comments he has made about deviating from standard vaccine policy making practice suggest that new recommendations won’t be backed by established vaccine science,” warns Scientific American.

The magazine has compiled a chart of ACIP’s recommended childhood vaccine schedules that were in place as of the end of 2024, prior to Kennedy’s ACIP purge. The normal, scientific ACIP recommended a very specific schedule for vaccinating infants and toddlers against diseases including measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, COVID, influenza, chickenpox, and RSV. It might be worth keeping that chart handy, to compare it to what Kennedy’s lackeys ultimately recommend.

Mike Johnson, Phone Home

Republicans in Louisiana are panicking about Medicaid cuts in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s home state “is poorer, sicker and hungrier than most states, and the deep cuts to Medicaid have a growing number of Republicans in Louisiana worried that Congress and the White House are going too far,” Politico reports.

Thirty-five percent of Louisianans rely on Medicaid for health coverage, which is why the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a unanimous resolution pleading with Congress for no cuts to the program. One Republican state representative, Jack McFarland, assessed the bill’s projected impact on rural hospitals this way: “I live an hour from the closest hospital, and I’m in a rural community. You close my rural hospital? People are going to die because they will not make it.”

Some Grant Money Flowing From NIH Following Judge’s Order Against Racist Terminations

The National Institutes of Health appears to have begun restoring some grant funding following Judge William Young’s scathing order excoriating the Trump administration for its discriminatory cancellations of $12 billion in research grants the Trump administration arbitrarily deemed to be part of “DEI” or “gender ideology.” Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, said while ruling in the case, “I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.” He later denied the government’s request to stay his ruling pending appeal, saying that his order merely requires the agency to spend money appropriated by Congress, “rather than sequestering funds (probably forever) during the course of the appeal.” Still, some grant recipients are still uncertain whether theirs is funding that will be unblocked.

Russell Vought Takes Aim at the Impoundment Control Act

Led by Russell Vought, Trump’s director of the powerful Office of Management and Budget, the administration “appears to be readying to push the boundaries of the law meant to prevent the president from unilaterally overturning spending decisions made by Congress,” the Washington Post reports.

Thank You for Your Service, Trump-Style

As if the Trump administration’s heartless treatment of career federal employees was not bad enough, subjecting them to abuse by Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), arbitrary layoffs, mass confusion, re-hirings and re-firings, there’s yet another indignity the administration is inflicting on former feds. NBC News reports that several employees fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) received demand letters for payments of their health insurance premiums—even though their coverage had lapsed following their dismissal.

McIver Pleads Not Guilty

Rep. LaMonica McIver (R-NJ) pled not guilty yesterday to federal charges alleging that she interfered with immigration agents’ arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for trespassing at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. (The charges against Baraka were later dropped.) McIver pledged that the administration’s “intimidation and bullying” of elected officials would not deter her from carrying out her oversight responsibilities.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has launched an investigation into a “politically-motivated abuse of prosecutorial power” by the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Alina Habba, previously a personal lawyer to Trump. The McIver prosecution is part of what Raskin called “a concerted strategy to deter congressional oversight and relentlessly pursue Donald Trump’s extreme immigration policy with complete disregard for the rule of law and the lawmaking branch of the government.”

Trump Profits from … Bible Sales

In White House financial disclosures, Trump has reported receiving $1.3 million in royalties for his endorsement of the “God Bless America” Bible last year. Just in case you were concerned that it’s very tacky and possibly blasphemous to profit from appropriating a sacred text in this way, the amount is just a tiny fraction of the $600 million Trump made in 2024. That total came from his golf courses, crypto ventures, Trump-branded items like sneakers, watches, and guitars, as well as a coffee table book about the failed attempt on his life.

Gird Yourself for the Ugliest Islamophobia

With the prospect of Zohran Mamdani becoming mayor of New York City, right-wing influencers promptly began flooding the zone with anti-Muslim hate. Numerous MAGA figures, including Donald Trump, Jr., Rep. Nancy Mace (R-NC), Laura Loomer, and Charlie Kirk insinuated that if elected, Mamdani would bring about another 9/11.

Important Read

Laura Rozen reports Trump is using the belief that his bombing strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities, disputed by the government’s own intelligence, as a loyalty test. Remind you of anything?

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