Dems Fighting Back

A few interesting tidbits from the news.

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There is a special election on Saturday, this one in Louisiana.

A Louisiana Democrat resigned a statehouse seat in an area that Trump carried by 13 points.  Regardless of the outcome the Rs keep their supermajority in the Louisiana House, but this still matters for two reasons.  One, because a win is a win is a win.  But beyond that, a win for the Ds would give us a high-profile win with bragging rights, and one more win in a whole series of special election wins since the orange turd took office.  If the Rs win, well, we all know how they will spin this.  Fingers crossed.  Louisiana peeps, I hope you have been watching the news.

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What to do about ICE?  

There has been some talk here about Rein in ICE vs. Abolish ICE.

Simon Rosenberg has some thoughts.

End The Violence

End The Lawlessness

Narrow The Targets   (stop the scope creep and focus on the statement mission of removing criminals)

Seems good to me!

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Robert Reich seems to agree with H. E. Wolf

Q: “You’re almost 80. Where do you find the energy to write so many Substack posts?”

A: “I was born 10 days after Trump. If he can create this much mayhem every day, I should be able to do a little bit to counter him every day.”

If Robert Reich can do it, so can we.

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Another important and gratifying smackdown from the courts

Jen Rubin shares her thoughts.

What followed from U.S. District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes for the District of Columbia was a literary and legal masterpiece using Noem’s own vicious racism against her in a case challenging the revocation of TPS status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians refugees.

Reyes started by debunking the government’s clumsy attempt to smear the plaintiffs: “Plaintiffs are five Haitian TPS holders. They are not, it emerges, ‘killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies.’” Instead, Reyes explained, they are a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a software engineer at a national bank, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department, a college economics major, and a full-time registered nurse. The constant lies and dehumanization of immigrants are both a moral disgrace and, in this case, the regime’s legal Achilles heel.

“Plaintiffs charge that Secretary Noem preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to non-white immigrants,” Reyes wrote. “This seems substantially likely.” Reyes pointed to Noem’s own blatantly racist language and failure to conduct any independent review. While the statute allows her ample discretion regarding TPS determination, she does not have “unbounded discretion.” The court therefore found that she failed to clear the low bar that would allow her to deport the Haitian refugees.

Reyes then demolished the regime’s refrain that the courts must let the executive branch do whatever it pleases. “To the contrary, Congress passed the TPS statute to standardize the then ad hoc temporary protection system—to replace executive whim with statutory predictability.” (Increasingly, lower courts are rejecting the notion that the executive branch’s actions are unreviewable. It seems that Article III federal judges think there is a role for the federal courts in our constitutional system.)

In addition, Reyes cited the regime’s own travel warnings to demonstrate the irreparable harm that would befall Haitians if they were sent home. “‘Do not travel to Haiti for any reason’ does not exactly scream, as Secretary Noem concluded, suitable for return.” Then, in a tour de force, Reyes shredded Noem’s position that the balance of equities favors the government…

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The Librarians  (no not that one, and not the other one either)

The Contrarian

When Americans of the future look back on this disgraceful period in our national history — assuming the republic survives — they will need artifacts from our time to help them understand the villains and the unlikely heroes who resisted the slide into fascism. The Librarians, a 2025 documentary directed by the Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Kim Snyder and airing beginning Feb. 9 on PBS, may well be one of those period pieces they turn to make sense of this upside-down moment.

Through the eyes of nine school librarians, this surprisingly gripping documentary chronicles the wave of book censorship across the United States to its contemporary swell in right-wing and Christian nationalist organizations such as Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. It might just convince you that, in our moment of peril, it was the librarians of our nation’s public schools who helped save the day. At the very least, it will make you marvel at the courage and tenacity of a diverse group of ordinary, not very political people whose line of work is generally imagined to involve nothing more dramatic than an overdue book. Like so many of the people of Minneapolis in recent days, when the chips were down, the librarians stood up for what is right.

May you live in interesting times.

No thank you, I would rather not.

Open thread.

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