More: Trump's mouthpiece justifies it this way: "President Trump is rightfully enlisting his emergency powers to quickly rectify four years of failure and fix the many catastrophes he inherited from Joe Biden " wide open borders, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, radical climate regulations, historic inflation, and economic and national security threats posed by trade deficits."

Unpack that for a second. A failed previous presidency, wars fought by other countries in other countries, subsidies for green energy, 2.7 percent inflation, and a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades: if this amounts to a "national emergency," then an emergency is a permanent condition, and the president can rule by fiat from here on out. And so here we are: with the Congress a sad rubber-stamp to the mad king, and with the lower-court checks on him stayed by SCOTUS, which is taking its own sweet time to adjudicate.

----

The question, it seems to me, is how Trump might respond to a real SCOTUS setback, or to a House he doesn't totally control. And the answer to that we already know: he will assault the court's legitimacy, threaten the Justices with mob violence, refuse to end the tariffs, and " of course! " claim the 2026 elections are rigged. The same, I think, applies to his term limits. He will attempt to defy them along the lines of his beloved thug-tyrant, Bukele. And if that open assault on a clear Constitutional amendment doesn't fly, which may be a stretch even for MAGA vandals, it still won't be over.

If a Democrat wins in 2028, Trump will call the election rigged and illegitimate, and will re-stage 2020 on behalf of a successor " with the full weight of the federal government behind him. If a Republican wins, Trump will remain POTUS the way Putin stayed president after making Medvedev "president" in 2008. Trump is an instinctual tyrant, and once those characters have tasted raw, arbitrary power, as he has, they can never let go. He must either have a family member succeed him or a puppet. Don Jr or JD " Trump's Medvedev.

The stain of this will therefore be deep and permanent. It already is. Trump intends to use the 250th celebration next year as a Putin-style glorification of his reign. By then he'll be riding in the Qatari jet that the Senate just allowed him to keep permanently. Tyrants also demand permanent monuments to their glory. So having paved over the Rose Garden, Trump is now intending to add a massive 90,000 square foot gilded ballroom to the White House itself, forever cementing it as a palatial symbol for his new monarchy.

Some ------- kid who also happens to work for Trump got robbed trying to buy coke at 3 AM and all of DC will now pay for it.

He proved himself inept in his first term to anyone that was paying attention.

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." " Benito Mussolini

Martial law is the wrong way to combat homelessness.

DC crime is currently at a 30 year low. Just another distraction from the Epstein fiasco at the expense of an entire city.

ThEy'Re WeApOnIzInG tHe DoJ!!!

If you've ever been to Japan or an English village you'd know how ridiculous this is. American pick-ups are simply too big for the streets there.

Another piece of their plan to rig the midterms.

"Trump Threatens Federal Control of DC After House Oversight Committee Subpoenas Epstein files"

FTFY

Still not enough water to cover up the Epstein scandal.

I'd call it career suicide if he actually had a career.

Hey boaz, shut the ---- up.

Sincerely,
Everyone from NC

It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated ...website," the Library of Congress said in a statement posted to social media. "We've learned that this is due to a coding error."

More: "Manufacturing is in recession. Construction is in a deep recession. Transportation and distribution is in recession. Wholesaling is in recession. Retail is holding on by its thumbs, it's very close," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics.

He believes that as much as a third of the US economy is already effectively in recession.

"The industries that are going to get nailed, they're the kind of working class, low-to-middle income kind of job," Zandi says.

In other words, Trump has succeeded in splitting the US economy in two: while Wall Street and Silicon Valley are booming, the rest of the country is suffering a redneck recession. The working classes who helped Trump return to the White House are now suffering.

"We have an economy with really just one dynamic sector, the tech sector," says Dean Baker, the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a think tank.

Awesome! Hunting accidents are my favorite kind of accident.

More: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion that federal courts "are not equipped to apportion political power as a matter of fairness, nor is there any basis for concluding that they were authorized to do so."

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan recognized that a crucial opportunity had been missed. She wrote: "Of all times to abandon the Court's duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court's role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent."

Bob Phillips, executive director at Common Cause North Carolina, said it was hard to push the argument against partisan gerrymandering to the top of the U.S. judicial system only to have it found to be "nonjusticiable."

A House Republican said Monday that he plans to introduce legislation to ban mid-decade redistricting efforts nationwide

This is the right answer. It is destined to fail in the US house but I applaud the effort. If SCOTUS hadn't failed so badly when they tried this in NC it would already be illegal.

More: Instead of cutting waste, the initiative disrupted functioning systems and demoralized workers. Democrats are now calling for audits across 27 agencies and hinting at possible criminal investigations.

In the end, taxpayers are left covering $21.7 billion in losses.

$21.7 Billion Total Waste A Senate report estimates DOGE caused $21.7 billion in taxpayer waste between January and mid-July 2025.

$14.8 Billion for 200K Employees Paid Not to Work Deferred Resignation Program paid 200,000 federal workers to stay home for up to eight months.

$6.1 Billion on Administrative Leave for 100K+ Employees Over 100,000 employees were placed on paid administrative leave for weeks or months.

Summing Up: 300,000+ Workers and $21.7B Burned These two categories account for nearly $21 billion of the total waste.

The full $21.7B also includes losses from spoiled supplies, failed projects, and costly relocations.

Even more FTA: Judges are not the only players in the legal system who have shown a measure of distrust in the Justice Department. In an almost unheard-of move, federal grand juries in Los Angeles have been refusing to indict many defendants whom prosecutors have sought to charge in connection with immigration protests, according to recent news reports.

That situation underscored how the courts can work successfully only if people outside of government " jurors and witnesses, for instance " believe that the Justice Department is acting honestly, said Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia who recently wrote in The New York Times about the "credibility crisis" the department is facing.

"When the government loses credibility, you see it clearly in the reactions of other players in the legal system," Mr. Richman said. "That's the road we're on for now " unless something changes soon."

More: The dissolution of these traditional bonds of trust " known in legal circles as the presumption of regularity " goes well beyond judges' use of blunt words " "egregious," "brazen," "lawless" " to describe the various parts of Mr. Trump's power-grabbing policy agenda.

Ultimately, legal experts say, the actions that caused such doubts among judges about the department and those who represent it could have a more systemic effect and erode the healthy functioning of the courts.

"I think people don't fully appreciate how much the ability of the legal system to work on a daily basis rests on the government's credibility," said Stephen I. Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor. "Without that credibility, it's going to be harder for the government to do anything in court " even ordinary things. All of a sudden, you're going to have courts second-guessing things that they wouldn't have before."

While it is impossible to know for sure how deeply this distrust has set in among judges across the country, a number of judges in recent weeks have openly questioned the fundamental honesty and credibility of Justice Department lawyers in ways that would have been unthinkable only months ago.

In June, for instance, an order was unsealed in Federal District Court in Washington showing Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui ripping into prosecutors after they tried to convince him that he needed to be "highly deferential" to their request to keep sealed a search warrant in an ordinary criminal case.

"Blind deference to the government?" Judge Faruqui wrote. "That is no longer a thing. Trust that has been earned over generations has been lost in weeks."

After all, as the judge pointed out, Justice Department lawyers under Mr. Trump have done much to destroy the confidence normally afforded them in court.

They have fired prosecutors who worked on Mr. Trump's two criminal cases, he said. They have attacked the charges brought against the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as a witch hunt. And they have violated judicial orders in cases stemming from Mr. Trump's deportation policies and from his efforts to freeze federal grants.

"These norms being broken must have consequences," Judge Faruqui concluded. "High deference is out; trust but verify is in."

More: There is the case of Greece, where the government faked deficit numbers for years, contributing to a debilitating debt crisis that required multiple rounds of bailouts. The country then criminally prosecuted the head of the statistical agency when he insisted on reporting the true figures, further eroding the country's international standing.

There is the case of China, where earlier this century the local authorities manipulated data to hit growth targets mandated by Beijing, forcing analysts and policymakers to turn to alternative measures to gauge the state of the country's economy.

Perhaps most famously, there is the case of Argentina, which in the 2000s and 2010s systematically understated inflation figures to such a degree that the international community eventually stopped relying on the government's data. That loss of faith drove up the country's borrowing costs, worsening a debt crisis that ultimately led to it defaulting on its international obligations.

It is too soon to know whether the United States is on a similar path. But economists and other experts said that Mr. Trump's decision on Friday to fire Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was a troubling step in that direction.

Janet L. Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and chair of the Federal Reserve, said the firing was not what is expected from the most advanced economy in the world.

"This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic," Ms. Yellen said.

You'd think they'd want to get him as far away from their brand as possible.