A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
This Could Be Roe all Over Again
Some of Trump’s judicial nominees have refused in confirmation hearings to acknowledge that the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, striking down state bans on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional, was correctly decided. According to an analysis by JP Collins at the legal website Balls and Strikes, Eric Tung, who Trump nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, said only, “the Supreme Court granted such a right.” William Mercer, a nominee to the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, said Obergefell is “binding precedent,” but declined to “grade the Supreme Court.”
As Collins points out, these verbal gymnastics to avoid saying the case was correctly decided mirror those of Trump’s first term Supreme Court nominees who said Roe v. Wade was precedent but would not say it was correctly decided — and then voted to overturn it.
One might say marriage equality is different from abortion. Obergefell is just 10 years old, and Roe was decades old. But the most important feature that both decisions share is the enmity of the Christian right, and its determination to overturn them, no matter how many years or decades it takes.
Even before the court decided Obergefell in 2015, the Christian right was already planning to treat it just like Roe. The Supreme Court’s 1973 decision, they argued, was not the end of the abortion issue but rather the beginning. They used money, media, political might, religion, and relentless organizing to use abortion to drive politics and shape the judiciary. Their plans for Obergefell and LGBTQ rights are no different.
The New Big Law
In this New York Times story about the Washington Litigation Group, one of several new law firms formed to challenge hundreds of lawless Trump administration actions and policies, we learn that one of the members of the firm’s steering committee, Peter Keisler, was a founder of the Federalist Society and a former George W. Bush DOJ official. “We’ve just never before seen this kind of systematic effort by a government to use all possible levers of government power against perceived opponents,” Keisler told the Times about the need for the new firm.
Keisler’s background — and his trajectory from Federalist Society founder to Trump critic — is actually even more interesting than the story reveals. Bush had nominated Keisler to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2006, but he was never confirmed (the filibuster was still in place for judicial nominations, and then Democrats retook the Senate). Democrats resisted putting Keisler on D.C. appellate court, often a steppingstone to the Supreme Court, in part because the Bush administration reportedly saw Keisler, a former clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy and Judge Robert Bork, as potential high court material. Some very intriguing alternative history right there.
Whitehouse Keeps Attention on D.C. Circuit Stay of Boasberg Contempt Proceedings
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has written to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, raising questions about why a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit has maintained an administrative stay on contempt proceedings initiated by the district court’s chief judge, James Boasberg, in the case challenging the administration’s disappearance of Venezuelan detainees to the CECOT prison in El Salvador. The stay remained in place as Senate Republicans confirmed top Justice Department official Emil Bove, who had, according to a whistleblower report, urged line attorneys to say “fuck you” to district court orders. “If a court of the United States was used to stall contempt proceedings, in order to create a window for Senate confirmation of an individual central to those contempt proceedings…it would be a significant blow to the independence and integrity of the Judicial Branch,” Whitehouse wrote.
Trump Administration Takes Its Transphobia Global
At the United Nations, U.S. delegates have repeatedly condemned “gender ideology” or “reinforced the administration’s support for language that ‘recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male’” since Trump took office in January, ProPublica reports. It is part of a broader pattern of Trump officials attacking transgender rights internationally, even to the point of objecting to the use of the word “gender.”
ICE to Target Gen Z With Employment Recruitment Blitz
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking to contract with an advertising firm to help it “dominate” social media with a recruitment blitz aimed at Gen Z, with a goal of hiring more than 14,000 people to work for the agency, according to 404 Media.
One LLC Gets $231 Million in Federal Funds to Run Secretive ICE Facility in Texas
The El Paso Times has aerial photographs of the non-public construction of a new 5,000-bed ICE immigrant detention facility under construction at Fort Bliss in Texas. Acquisition Logistics LLC, a Virginia company, was awarded a $231,878,229 firm-fixed-price contract “to establish and operate” the facility, the newspaper reports. In other (lack of) transparency news, in Florida, TPM’s Hunter Walker finds that contract and other public documents relating to the Alligator Alcatraz prison have vanished, possibly illegally. And in other grotesque ICE prison camp news, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem yesterday announced an Alligator Alcatraz look-alike in Indiana — the “Speedway Slammer.”
RFK, Jr. Axes Government Support for Medical Marvel
The Health and Human Services Secretary has taken direct aim at health and humans by cancelling $500 million in federal contracts to develop vaccines using mRNA technology — like the vaccines against COVID-19 and vaccines in development to combat bird flu and other respiratory viruses.
Maxwell Transfer to Club Fed a ‘Travesty of Justice,’ Says Former Prison Official
Former Bureau of Prisons officials are angry about the transfer of convicted Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security camp in Texas. “To relocate a sex offender serving 20 years to a country club setting is offensive to victims and others serving similar crimes,” Robert Hood, a former Bureau of Prisons chief of internal affairs, told NBC News.
Comer Subpoenas Clintons
As expected, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) has issued subpoenas in the Epstein saga, notably to Hillary and Bill Clinton, and former FBI directors James Comey and Robert Mueller — part of the MAGA effort to deflect attention from Trump’s connections to Epstein and to blame Democrats for, well, everything. Notably, Axios notes, Alex Acosta, the former federal prosecutor who negotiated the 2008 “sweetheart” plea deal for Epstein in Florida and later became Labor Secretary in Trump’s first administration, is not on the subpoena list. He is, however, on Newsmax’s board of directors.
TACOs for Meteorologists
The Office of Personnel Management has authorized the rehiring of 450 meteorologists, hydrologists, and radar technicians who were axed from the National Weather Service by the Department of Government Efficiency.
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