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The President Should Not Have a License to Kill
The administration claims that the “war” on drugs justifies extrajudicial killing. But redefining civilian drug criminals as “combatants” gives away the reality: the government just militarized what was a low-level criminal law enforcement incident outside the United States. Once we consider the victims’ alleged illegal actions, we can see that the government committed the most egregious crime here.
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Brazil’s Bolsonaro May Soon Join Ranks of Failed Coup Plotters Held to Account − Hampering the Chance of Any Political Comeback
Brazil’s Supreme Court is expected to deliver a verdict by Sept. 12 over charges that the former president and key aides plotted to overturn Bolsonaro’s 2022 election defeat to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Prosecutors allege that Bolsonaro and others discussed a scheme to assassinate Lula and incited a riot on Jan. 8, 2023, in hopes that Brazil’s military would intervene and return Bolsonaro to power.
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Judge Warns of “National Police Force” in Ruling Trump Broke the Law Sending Guard to LA
President Donald Trump’s move to send National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to quell immigration protests in Los Angeles this summer violated a federal law against military members conducting domestic law enforcement, a federal judge in California ruled Tuesday.
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Governors Split Over Mobilizing National Guard as Trump Seeks More Troops
Republican governors want National Guard members to help ICE, in addition to deploying to Washington.
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She Pushed to Overturn Trump’s Loss in the 2020 Election. Now She’ll Help Oversee U.S. Election Security.
Heather Honey has been appointed to a senior position in the Department of Homeland Security. State election officials and voting experts are concerned.
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Trump-appointed Judge Blasts Administration for Campaign Against Judiciary
A Trump-appointed federal judge dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit against all 15 federal district judges in Maryland Tuesday, emphasizing the extraordinary nature of the case and excoriating the administration for its treatment of the judiciary as a whole.
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How to Reverse Nation’s Declining Birth Rate
Health experts urge policies that buoy families: lower living costs, affordable childcare, help for older parents who want more kids
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Voting from Your Sofa Is Secure Enough – but Will It Be Allowed?
A new electronic voting system developed at NTNU can withstand attacks from quantum computers, meaning digital elections can be conducted securely, even in the future.
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On Nonexistent Crime “Emergencies”: Trump’s Politicization of the National Guard
What Trump is doing now has nothing to do with “crime control” because the DC murder and crime rate is the lowest it’s been in literally decades. These out-of-state National Guard call-ups from Red states are designed to intimidate elected Democrats in major metropolitan areas under the guise of “fighting crime” and alleged immigration enforcement. Trump’s use of Title 32 authority to do this is a misuse of the statute, designed to get around the Posse Comitatus Act so he can use military personnel under the control of Trump loyalist governors for what can only be truthfully characterized as de facto political repression ops.
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What Would a More Effective Policing Strategy Look Like in D.C.?
We spoke with crime prevention expert David Kennedy about the Trump administration’s takeover of law enforcement in the nation’s capital, and the tactics that might prove more effective.
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The Data Doesn’t Support Trump’s Justification for Deploying the National Guard
The president has taken over policing in Washington, D.C., and threatened to do the same in other Democratic-led cities. An analysis by The Trace shows that his claims of runaway violence are false.
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Venezuela’s Attempts to Interfere in the September Guyana Election
Venezuela has long disputed Guyana’s claim to the sparsely populated Essequibo region, recognized by the international community as being part of Guinea. Venezuela has now extended its interference in Guyanese domestic affairs by seemingly supporting the candidacy of the colorful, and controversial, candidate Azruddin Mohamed, who is under U.S. sanctions for gold smuggling and corruption.
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Backgrounder: Guyana’s Forthcoming Election
Guyana is a small country –population of only 831,000 –but rich in recently discovered oil reserves, reserves estimated to hold the equivalent of 11 billion barrels. On 1 September the country will hold a national and regional election.
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Turnover Among Election Officials Reaches New High: Report
Election officials turned over at the highest rate in at least a quarter century during the last presidential election. Nearly 40 percent of election officials administering the 2024 election weren’t around in 2020.
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President Trump’s War on “Woke AI” Is a Civil Liberties Nightmare
The White House’s recently-unveiled “AI Action Plan” wages war on so-called “woke AI”—including large language models (LLMs) that provide information inconsistent with the administration’s views on climate change, gender, and other issues. The plan would force developers to roll back efforts to reduce biases—making the models much less accurate, and far more likely to cause harm, especially in the hands of the government.
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The long view
The Paranoid Style in American Oversight, Part II
The criticism of the techniques used in the FBI’s investigation of the false electors plot, much like the critiques of how it was opened, do not bear scrutiny. The days of the FBI trying to speak only through indictments are apparently over, and Director Kash Patel’s willingness to endlessly provide piecemeal documents, without any explanation, annotation, or context to the bureau’s most vituperative critics is just one more sign not that a page has merely been turned, but that it has been ripped out of the book entirely and burned to cinders.
Presidential Discretion and the Insurrection Act
The Supreme Court, in Trump v. Illinois, further diminished the president’s ability to use § 12406 to federalize the National Guard in order to directly interfere in domestic activities in pursuit of his most controversial policies. With § 12406 now unavailable, the likelihood of the current president resorting to the Insurrection Act, the statute affording him the most oppressive domestic suppression capabilities, has only increased.