Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Over the 20th century, the U.S. developed norms that separated the justice system from the whims of the president. Trump is breaking that down and weakening the United States as a strong democracy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUw20SsfosQ
“The constitution doesn’t guarantee Kimmel a talk show, but it does guarantee that the government won’t quash his speech because of what he chooses to say.
…
The basic facts of Kimmel’s suspension are straightforward. The late-night host has been accused of mischaracterizing the motives of the alleged assassin of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, suggesting he may have hailed from the political right. On Wednesday, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, appeared on Benny Johnson’s podcast and described Kimmel’s remarks as part of a “concerted effort to lie to the American people.” The FCC, he said, has “remedies that we can look at.” He added: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way …. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
After Carr’s threat, Nexstar, an owner of many ABC affiliate stations, said that it wouldn’t run Kimmel’s program “for the foreseeable future” because of his Kirk comments. (Notably, Nexstar is planning to acquire a rival company, Tegna, in a $6.2 billion deal that will require FCC approval.)
Mere hours later, ABC had removed Kimmel from the air.
When the Supreme Court dismissed the Covid-social media suit against the Biden administration, it held that the plaintiffs lacked a legal right to sue — called standing — because they could not link anything the federal government did to the suppression of their speech. As Justice Amy Coney Barrett put it, the flaw in the case was a “lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation.”
Here, by contrast, the evidence of “specific causation” is plain to see: Carr threatens ABC unless it sanctions Kimmel. ABC does as Carr asks. The FCC, to be sure, does not have authority to police the alleged truth of statements made on television. But that doesn’t mean that the agency can’t use its investigative powers to raise costs for targeted media outlets and it can clearly exert its influence on any potential acquisitions. And for all his recent talk about supporting free speech, this isn’t Carr’s first pressure campaign against a perceived antagonist of President Donald Trump. In July, he issued threats against Comcast, demanding more favorable coverage of Republicans from its NBC affiliates.
The Trump administration also has a clear model when it comes to leaning on media firms to silence speech it dislikes: The president’s executive orders punishing law firms for their association with disfavored clients and advocacy of out-of-season causes likewise deployed regulatory tools to try to achieve plainly impermissible censorship. Like Carr’s action this week, those executive orders in part worked through the economic pressure firms experienced, even as their First Amendment rights were being violated.
Although the Supreme Court did not ultimately decide the merits in the social media case, no justice doubted the clear-as-day First Amendment principle that, as Alito explained, “government officials may not coerce private entities to suppress speech.” Indeed, less than a month beforehand, the unanimous court held in a different case that the First Amendment “prohibits government officials from relying on the ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion . . . to achieve the suppression’ of disfavored speech.”
In a separate opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch explained what a plaintiff needed to show to get into court: Could the government’s conduct, when “viewed in context,” be “reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress the plaintiff ’s speech?”
This principle is both simple and sound: The government can’t do indirectly, through shadowy threats and mafia-like intimidation, what it is barred from doing directly. Indeed, this is a principle that even Trump apparently believes in: In July 2021, he filed civil actions against Facebook, Twitter and YouTube alleging that unconstitutional government jaw-boning of those firms led to the take-down and shadow banning of his and others’ speech.
Kimmel may have contractual remedies against ABC. But he also has a powerful constitutional claim for prospective relief and damages against the federal government much like the one that Trump sought to vindicate in 2021. A principled consistency would require those who objected to the Biden administration’s engagement with social media firms to support Kimmel. (To be clear, I am not holding my breath.)”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/18/jimmy-kimmel-supreme-court-first-amendment-lawsuit-00570697?nid=00000180-3e78-de92-addf-fe7ff2220000&nname=politico-weekend&nrid=00000164-e69d-d274-a7f4-e6ff06410000
The big city libs want to fund rural hospitals in flyover country. Trump does not.
“President Donald Trump pressed Congress in July to pass his big tax and spending law, which slashed more than $1 trillion from health care programs and could lead to an estimated 11.8 million people losing their health insurance. It also included cuts to what’s known as the provider tax, which nearly all states use to increase Medicaid payments to hospitals, in part to help them fund services in rural communities where providing care may not otherwise be financially possible.
By one estimate, the law’s tax cuts could force more than 300 rural hospitals to close. In Erwin, Tennessee, it may mean Unicoi Hospital never reopens, leaving the county without any hospitals or emergency rooms.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/22/54-survivors-a-flooded-hospital-and-trumps-political-bloodbath-00518507
“The poorest 10% of households will lose an average of about $1,200 in resources per year, amounting to a 3.1% cut in their income, according to the analysis released Monday of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Households in the highest 10% of incomes will see about a $13,600 boost in resources on average, amounting to a 2.7% increase in their incomes.
Earners in the middle of the distribution will see their annual resources grow by about $800 to $1,200 on average, according to the analysis.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-tax-law-squeezes-poor-185207334.html
Trump’s Border Czar says ICE is just enforcing the law. If you don’t like ICE enforcing the law when it comes to illegal immigrants, then contact Congress and tell them to change it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOgV_3IwPpA
“Yoshida at first glance appeared to be quite helpful to the Trump administration.
The court concluded that the tariff was legally justified under the TWEA to address the trade imbalance and pointed to language in the statute that authorized the president to “regulate” the “importation” of foreign goods in the event of an emergency. That language was carried over into IEEPA as part of a much longer list of actions permitted by the president, though that list does not explicitly mention either tariffs or taxes (a point to which we will return).
In light of the parallel statutory language in TWEA and IEEPA, the Justice Department argued that Yoshida “continues to control today” and requires the Court of International Trade to rule in favor of the Trump administration.
As Wednesday’s decision makes clear, it was not so simple.
In several crucial respects, the Yoshida decision cut sharply against the administration’s position. That put the Justice Department in the awkward — and generally unenviable — position of having to pick and choose which parts of the decision that it likes, and which parts of the decision the courts should ignore.
For starters, the Yoshida decision rejected a key proposition that is at the heart of the government’s defense of Trump’s tariffs — the notion that courts have no power to review a president’s actions under IEEPA.
The court ruled in Yoshida that each presidential action under the statute “must be evaluated on its own facts and circumstances.” The court went on to emphasize that its ruling, while favorable to the Nixon administration, was not a blanket approval of “any future surcharge of a different nature, or any surcharge differently applied or any surcharge not reasonably related to the emergency declared;” that the president’s actions under the statute “must also bear a reasonable relation to the particular emergency confronted;” and that “emergencies are expected to be shortlived.”
In other words, the facts matter. But the facts then under Nixon — and the facts now under Trump — are markedly different.
Nixon’s tariff was fixed at 10 percent and in place for less than five months. Trump’s tariff framework is far more ambitious, open-ended and has been all over the place since his inauguration — with the effective dates and applicable countries, rates, exceptions and concessions under seemingly constant revision.
And if Trump and some of his advisors are to be believed, there would be no end in sight. “If President Trump succeeds like he wants to succeed,” Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro said earlier this year, “we are going to structurally shift the American economy from one over-reliant on income taxes and the Internal Revenue Service, to one which is also reliant on tariff revenue and the External Revenue Service.” That is a far cry from a five-month, supplemental 10 percent tariff like what Nixon imposed.
Two other, subtler points in the Yoshida decision made things worse for the administration.
First, Nixon’s tariff did not apply to all imports — only those that had been the subject of prior concessions under the government’s tariff schedule — and Nixon made clear in announcing the policy that the rates would nevertheless be capped at levels that Congress had previously set for the relevant goods. As a result, the court concluded in Yoshida that “the congressionally established rates remained untouched” and that Nixon was not claiming the power to simply impose “whatever tariff rates he deems desirable.”
Trump made no such concessions, which made it a relatively straightforward matter for the court on Wednesday to contrast Nixon’s “limited” tariffs with those imposed by Trump. Indeed, given the administration’s position that the courts cannot review Trump’s emergency declarations in support of the tariffs or circumscribe his authority to issue tariffs under IEEPA, he has effectively claimed the power not just to issue “whatever tariff rates he deems desirable” but to impose those tariffs whenever he wants, for any reason that he wants and for however long he wants.
Second, as a footnote in the Yoshida decision notes, Congress later enacted a specific statutory provision to address the problem that attracted the Nixon administration’s attention. That provision authorizes the president to impose tariffs in response to “large and serious … balance-of-payments deficits,” but it caps those tariffs at 15 percent and limits them to a duration of just 150 days unless Congress authorizes an extension.
Needless to say, the Trump administration did not invoke that statute, and Justice Department lawyers sought to downplay its significance given the fact that Congress kept the statutory language at issue in Yoshida on the books in IEEPA.
This argument also did not move the three judges on the Court of International Trade. They concluded that the existence of the statute demonstrated that “even ‘large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits’ do not necessitate the use of emergency powers” and that they “justify only the President’s imposition of limited remedies subject to enumerated procedural constraints.”
The argument was rooted in the conclusion in Yoshida that if a president wanted to impose a similar tariff in the future, he must “comply with the statute now governing such action.”
Trump, of course, had no interest in doing that.
There is no way to definitively predict how the appellate court — and eventually the Supreme Court”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/05/29/trump-tariffs-court-defeat-00374194
“President Donald Trump claims that the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 grants him the power to deport certain Venezuelan-born aliens without due process, based on the mere allegation of membership in a criminal street gang.
But the text of the Alien Enemies Act does not allow the president to do anything of the sort. “Whenever there shall be a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion shall be perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States, by any foreign nation or government,” the act states, the president may direct the “removal” of “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being males of the age of fourteen years and upwards, who shall be within the United States, and not actually naturalized.”
The crimes of the alleged members of the street gang Tren de Aragua do not meet this legal standard. There is no “declared war” between the United States and Venezuela, and there is no “invasion or predatory incursion” of the U.S. by “any foreign nation or government.” The gang is not a foreign state, and the gang’s alleged crimes, heinous as they may be, do not qualify as acts of war by a foreign state. Trump’s frequent talk about a rhetorical “invasion” of the U.S. by undocumented immigrants utterly fails to satisfy the law’s requirements.”
https://reason.com/2025/05/26/dont-use-the-alien-enemies-act-on-alien-friends/
“Trump had used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs on nearly all imports to the U.S., even though that law narrowly authorizes presidential actions only in response to “an unusual and extraordinary threat.”
International commerce is plainly neither of those things, as the court concluded in its ruling. “We do not read IEEPA to delegate an unbounded tariff authority to the President,” the judges wrote. “We instead read IEEPA’s provisions to impose meaningful limits on any such authority it confers.”
By reviewing the actions of the executive branch to ensure they comport with the underlying law, the Court of International Trade merely fulfilled the constitutional role of the judiciary. ”
https://reason.com/2025/05/29/did-activist-judges-derail-trumps-tariffs/
The Bombshell Case That Will Transform the Housing Market
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUg6HVO0o9w
JD Vance takes to Twitter to make false claims while advocating for taking away immigrants’ due process rights.
The right to due process is for all people on American soil. It doesn’t mean people suspected of being illegal immigrants get a full jury trial, but there is some appropriate process to decrease the possibility of penalizing, deporting, or sending them to a dictator who may kill them for opposing the authoritarian regime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2ERNHiToU0