A federal judge on Thursday blocked key pillars of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overhaul the 2026 elections, declaring unconstitutional his attempts to create centralized lists of adult citizens and giving the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority over who can vote by mail. The 37-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani concluded that the president did not have the…
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Seated behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office in early May, Donald Trump delivered a disturbing lecture to a group of children huddled around him — most of them not yet even teenagers. They had been brought to the White House for what was supposed to be a celebratory event marking the reinstatement of the Presidential Fitness Test, dressed in brightly colored T-shirts bearing the government…
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Under the Trump regime, the United States has entered a dark age in which conscience is not merely ignored but systematically dismantled. Compassion is mocked as weakness, truth treated as disposable, and cruelty elevated into a governing principle. This is more than corruption. It signals the suffocation of civic culture under gangster capitalism — a predatory system in which power serves wealth…
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Last week, Republicans in Congress passed a framework for a proposed round of funding for ICE and Border Patrol. The measure was intended to end an impasse over Department of Homeland Security funding, which lapsed over 10 weeks ago.
But the budgetary framework, which includes $70 billion for both agencies, came with a twist: No Democratic input needed.
Republicans bypassed the normal budget process in a move The Hill said sets a “dangerous precedent” and could lead to one-sided steamrolling to secure unilateral funding for unpopular policies like continuing the US-Israeli War with Iran.
To secure funding without a single vote from any Congressional Democrat, Republicans have invoked an arcane procedure known as “reconciliation,” a legislative maneuver that allows a bill to bypass the Senate filibuster, provided it meets certain criteria. Their reason for deploying it? To sidestep opposition from Democrats, who had declined to fund ICE or CBP without reforms, and the democratic process altogether.
Democrats have been demanding ICE and CBP agents stop wearing masks, use body cameras, and discontinue raids on homes without warrants, among other stipulations, in exchange for funding the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans refused to concede on any of these issues, and a 76-day shutdown ensued.
But this week, Republicans decided to go it alone, and their effort may be successful. As a result, the passage of the budget framework through the reconciliation process is an alarming move for a party that has already demonstrated a clear willingness to discard democratic norms, processes, and guardrails.
The framework also left a lot of questions unanswered, including: Why the additional money for controversial agencies that already received nearly $140 billion from
President Donald Trump is dismantling U.S. democracy at an “unprecedented” rate, downgrading the U.S.’s democratic rating on a global scale and plunging the country toward autocracy at a faster rate than autocratic leaders of other countries in the 21st century, the latest report by an international democracy watchdog finds. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Sweden’s Gothenburg…
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I lived in Argentina in the mid-1980s, just after the fall of the brutal military dictatorship that ruled from 1976 to 1983. The country was taking its first, shaky steps back toward democracy. It was a time of great hope, but also of grave uncertainty — because while the generals were gone, the political culture that enabled them remained. Like most of the nation, I was captivated by the…
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