Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
The federal government demonstrated the latest example of how its putting Trump’s focus on Antifa into practice on Thursday by designating four European anti-fascist groups as foreign terrorist organizations.
The groups — Germany’s Antifa Ost, Italy’s Informal Anarchist Federation, and Greece’s Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense — will lose access to the U.S. financial system. More importantly, its now a crime for “U.S. persons” (that’s a broader category than citizens) to provide any form of support to these groups.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the designations, explicitly citing NSPM-7, the executive order that directed law enforcement to go after Antifa and to focus on vague ideological markers in doing so.
“Groups affiliated with this movement ascribe to revolutionary anarchist or Marxist ideologies, including anti-Americanism, ‘anti-capitalism,’ and anti-Christianity, using these to incite and justify violent assaults domestically and overseas,” Rubio said in the statement.
As I reported this week, a wide range of progressive-leaning nonprofits are already deeply intimidated by the administration’s threats towards the left.
But the foreign terrorist designations show how far this is going. This required coordination between government agencies, and for the federal law enforcement offices that oversee counterterrorism policy to have some idea of who they’re targeting. In other words: no matter how amorphous and ill-defined Antifa may be, these designations are real evidence to demonstrate that the administration is doubling down on making investigations into the left very, very real.
— Josh Kovensky
Thune Payout Provision Riles Up House Republicans
House Republicans are furious about the 11th hour payout provision Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) shoved into the continuing resolution (CR) that ended the shutdown earlier this week.
So much so that Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) voted against reopening the government on Wednesday, saying he “could not in good conscience support a resolution that creates a self-indulgent legal provision for certain senators to enrich themselves by suing the Justice Department using taxpayer dollars.”
House GOP leadership is now working on bringing a standalone bill to the floor that would repeal the provision that would allow senators to sue the government for $500,000 or more if they discover their electronic records were seized without notification.
Thune’s provision comes as congressional Republicans have, in recent weeks, attempted to create a conspiracy theory out of the fact that former special counsel Jack Smith properly subpoenaed eight Senate Republicans’ phone records as a part of his investigation into President Donald Trump’s role in Jan. 6. As Politico noted earlier this week, the D.C. judge who approved the subpoenas did so with certain measures that blocked phone companies from notifying the senators that their data was requested as part of the investigation.
On the other side of the Capitol, Senate Republicans are largely distancing themselves from Thune’s provision.
Only one — Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — of the eight known GOP senators whose phone records were seized, has publicly said they are planning to take advantage of the measure Thune snuck into the bill.
“It bothers the hell out of me and I’m going to sue, and I’m going to create opportunities for others to sue that weren’t in the Senate,” Graham recently told reporters, per the Post and Courier.
Meanwhile, the others — Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Dan Sullivan (R-AK) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) — either said they would not sue or distanced themselves from the issue. A Sullivan spokesperson said the senator would support an effort to repeal the provision.
“I think the Senate provision is a bad idea,” Hawley said in a statement. “There needs to be accountability for the Biden DOJ’s outrageous abuse of the separation of powers, but the right way to do that is through public hearings, tough oversight, including of the complicit telecom companies, and prosecution where warranted.”
— Emine Yücel
DOJ Sues California Over Prop 50
In the latest news in the ongoing redistricting battle, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit in federal court on Thursday to try to block the new congressional districts in California that voters approved earlier this month, arguing that the new map used race as a “proxy to advance political interests.”
California voters approved Proposition 50 64% to 36% on Nov. 4, giving California officials the authority to temporarily bypass the state’s independent redistricting rules in order to create new congressional maps that will give Democrats an advantage in some Republican-led and swing districts in the state.
The measure was pushed forward by California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom as a way to offset the damage being done in Texas. GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott approved five new congressional maps in Texas that are expected to flip Democratic seats in the midterm elections.
The DOJ’s lawsuit joins a challenge from the California Republican Party, which claims that these new congressional district lines are “based on race, specifically to favor Hispanic voters, without cause or evidence to justify it.”
“Race cannot be used as a proxy to advance political interests, but that is precisely what the California General Assembly did with Proposition 50—the recent ballot initiative that junked California’s pre-existing electoral map in favor of a rush-job rejiggering of California’s congressional district lines,” the lawsuit states. “In the press, California’s legislators and governor sold a plan to promote the interests of Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Currently, GOP-led states, including Texas, North Carolina and Missouri have all succumbed to Trump’s pressure campaign to redraw their congressional maps mid-cycle as a way to ensure Republicans maintain control of the U.S. House in the midterm elections. But the approval of Proposition 50 in California, combined with a series of setbacks in red states across the country, could derail Trump’s gerrymandering blitz.
— Khaya Himmelman
Even MAGA Thinks Trump’s New Mortgage Scheme is a Bad Idea
At 37 years old, Bill Pulte, Trump’s Federal Housing Finance Agency Director and heir to the Pulte home builders empire, is younger than the now-40-year-old median first-time homebuyer. This didn’t stop him from promoting Trump’s new 50-year mortgage proposal which, by definition, the median first-time homebuyer wouldn’t pay off until they’re 90.
The media this week picked up on an idea Trump floated in a substanceless social media post over the weekend suggesting he wanted to institute a 50-year mortgage payment plan. Pulte quickly backed the president, posting on X that the administration was “indeed working on The 50 year Mortgage – a complete game changer.” The idea would be that government-backed home loans could be paid off over a longer period of time, thereby lowering monthly mortgage payments. But legally, the government can’t back a loan longer than 30 years.
And a lot of people, apparently even Trump’s MAGA allies, think the idea sucks.
First of all, 50-year mortgages generally have higher interest rates than the traditional 30-year mortgage. A buyer would spend decades paying interest only, unable to generate any equity in the property. Axios broke down the true cost of a $500,000, 50-year mortgage and showed that after 30 years, a buyer would still owe nearly $400,000. What’s more, monthly payments would only be $83 less than those for a 30-year loan.
Fox News’ Laura Ingraham put it more bluntly, telling Trump during an interview this week that the proposal garnered “significant MAGA backlash, calling it a giveaway to the banks.”
Luckily for borrowers, the proposal appears to be DOA. The plan would likely require legislation to change the post-global financial crisis Dodd-Frank Act. Even then, “borrowers will not do it,” Bruce Marks, the CEO of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America told NPR. “They see through that. They will know that they will not generate any wealth.”
— Layla A. Jones
