Column: Markets to GOP: We won’t save you from Trump’s folly
The realization is starting to dawn on some Republicans that their political solvency won’t last longer than President Trump’s economic irrationality.
Justices pause order to reinstate fired federal employees
The Supreme Court on Tuesday paused an order by a judge in San Francisco that would require the federal government to reinstate more than 16,000 workers who were fired by six agencies earlier this year. A group of nonprofits challenging the layoffs argued that the terminations by the Office of Personnel Management violated several different parts of the federal law governing administrative agencies. But by an apparent vote of 7-2, the justices nonetheless put the order by Senior U.S. District Judge William Alsup on hold while the challenge to the firings continues, explaining that the nonprofits do not have a legal right, known as standing, to challenge the terminations.
In a brief unsigned order, the court explained that it was not weighing in on the claims by other plaintiffs in the lawsuit – specifically, unions representing government employees, whose claims Alsup did not address because he concluded that he likely did not have the power to hear them. The court also did not weigh in on the propriety of the firings more generally.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor indicated that she would have denied the Trump administration’s request to pause Alsup’s order.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also would have turned down the Trump administration’s plea, because she would not have reached the question of the nonprofits’ standing to sue at this stage of the case.
The layoffs of tens of thousands of probationary employees – that is, employees who have been newly hired for a position, usually within the past year – in February came as part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to reduce the size of the federal workforce.
A group of nonprofits, arguing that layoffs could lead to fewer government services, which could in turn harm their members, went to federal court in San Francisco, seeking to have the probationary employees returned to their jobs.
Alsup concluded that although federal agencies can fire their own employees, the “Office of Personnel Management has no authority to hire and fire employees in another agency.” On March 13, he issued a preliminary injunction that directed OPM and six federal agencies – the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, and the Treasury – to immediately bring back the probationary employees who had been fired.
A federal appeals court rejected the government’s request to put Alsup’s order on hold while its appeal – which the court agreed to fast-track – moved forward.
The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court on March 25, asking the justices to temporarily pause Alsup’s order. Sarah Harris, then the acting U.S. solicitor general, contended (among other things) that the nonprofits do not have a legal right to sue, known as standing, to challenge the layoffs. Alsup’s ruling, she argued, also lets “third parties hijack the employment relationship between the federal government and its workforce.”
The nonprofits countered that they have standing to sue because the layoffs will affect their members – for example, the firings of workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs “has already had and will imminently continue to have serious negative consequences” for the members of a veterans’ nonprofit who rely on federal services. And Alsup’s order, they wrote, simply “restored the status quo that existed prior to OPM’s illegal conduct.”
The two-paragraph order on Tuesday explained that Alsup’s order “was based solely on the allegations of the nine” nonprofits challenging the layoffs. But those allegations, the majority continued, “are presently insufficient” to give the nonprofits a legal right to sue. “This order does not address the claims of the other plaintiffs,” the majority noted, “which did not form the basis of” Alsup’s order.
Sotomayor noted only that she would have denied the Trump administration’s request, without explanation.
Jackson explained that, in an emergency appeal like this one, “where the issue is pending in the lower courts and the applicants have not demonstrated urgency in the form of interim irreparable harm,” she would not have ruled on the standing question at all.
Although the court put Alsup’s order on hold, a different federal judge in Maryland also has issued an order, which remains in effect for now, that requires the reinstatement of probationary employees at 20 federal agencies who live and work in the 19 states (along with the District of Columbia) that brought the case.
Tuesday’s order was the second in less than 24 hours putting a federal district judge’s order on hold and allowing – at least for now – the Trump administration to move forward with implementing its policies. On Monday evening, a closely divided court lifted a pair of orders by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg that had prohibited the government from removing noncitizens designated as members of a Venezuelan gang under a March 15 executive order issued by President Donald Trump. The majority in that case agreed with their dissenting colleagues – Sotomayor and Jackson, along with Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett – that noncitizens are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court .
The post Justices pause order to reinstate fired federal employees appeared first on SCOTUSblog .
I.R.S. Agrees to Share Migrants’ Tax Information With ICE
The agreement is a major departure from the Internal Revenue Service’s efforts to gain the trust of migrants and encourage them to file their taxes.
Trump tariffs leave global corporations with nowhere to hide
Global corporations rushed out of China to dodge tariffs during President Trump’s first term. This time around, they have nowhere to hide — and policy
Consumer sentiment plunged on Monday amid tariff chaos
Data: Morning Consult; Chart: Axios VisualsConsumer confidence dropped precipitously on Monday, as Americans absorbed news on stock market plunges and sky-high tariffs.Why it matters: The
Trump presses ahead with global trade war despite calls to reconsider
President claims ‘many’ countries are seeking a deal with US as he prepares to impose steep tariffs on trading partners
Donald Trump is poised to unleash his trade war with the world on Wednesday, pressing ahead with a slew of tariffs on the US’s largest trading partners despite fears of widespread economic damage and calls to reconsider.
The US president claimed “many” countries were seeking a deal with Washington, as his administration prepared to impose steep tariffs on goods from dozens of markets from Wednesday
A Truly Macabre White Lotus Plot
This article contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of The White Lotus.
The guests at White Lotus resorts arrive and leave by boat, a fact I’ve come to believe has some kind of mythological significance. These guests are never simply going on vacation. Rather, they’re entering some kind of magical-realist hinterland where they’re tormented by different iterations of fate, pride, vanity, and greed, a ritualistic evisceration accompanied by pool drinks and a spectacular breakfast buffet. The high Greekness of it all is offset by absurd humor. Is Tim really going to murder his entire family with piña coladas? I wondered, watching the Season 3 finale . Is this Duke University–loving, pill-popping, intrusive-thoughts-plagued man really capable of familicide?
Kind of! I’ve been hung up on Jason Isaacs’s Timothy Ratliff for several weeks now because his particular storyline is the darkest the HBO show has ever explored, wallowing in the suicidal fantasies of a man on the brink of ruin week after week after week. The day Tim got to the White Lotus Thailand, he learned that his relationship with a business associate accused of financial crimes was being investigated by journalists; by the third episode, the FBI was raiding his office, panicked employees were lighting up his phone, and the prospect of being outed to his family as a failure led Tim to confiscate everyone’s devices while dipping into his wife’s lorazepam stash. Since then, he’s been a haunted wretch of a character: stoned, sullen, stuck with recurring visions of shooting his wife and himself.
[Read: The rich tourists who want more, and more, and more ]
The White Lotus is a satire; two of my colleagues, defending the finale on Slack, pointed out that Tim’s final speech to his family before giving them cocktails spiked with the toxic seeds of the pong-pong tree (thank you to Pam, a bizarrely forthcoming hotel employee, for the detailed lowdown on how best to do it) could have been ripped right out of Arrested Development. But I didn’t find the scene funny, and I’m still not convinced it was intended to be. For three seasons now, the show has parsed the varying flaws and faces of poisoned masculinity. In Hawaii, back in Season 1 , Jake Lacy’s Shane exercised calamitous levels of entitlement while Steve Zahn’s Mark fretted over his diminished status within his marriage and the health of his testicles. In Season 2 , Albie (Adam DiMarco) reproached his father and grandfather for their old-school sexism while Cameron (Theo James) boorishly cheated on his wife and stiffed sex workers at the Sicilian hotel. But none of these storylines was as high-stakes or as bleak as Tim’s disintegration, through which the show examined all the ways in which a seemingly upstanding family man with no known history of violence might come to murder his wife and children.
Familicide, or family annihilation, the terms used to describe the act of murdering one’s children (and, often, one’s partner or ex-partner) is disturbingly common in the U.S., occurring roughly every five days . A 2013 study divided people who commit familicide into four different groups: anomic, disappointed, self-righteous, and paranoid. Tim fits cleanly into the anomic group, people who see their family as an extension of their success and status and are unable to imagine them continuing to exist after something has taken that status away. People who kill their family are overwhelmingly men, and most fail to fit any preexisting criminal profile. “Family annihilators were overwhelmingly not known to criminal justice or mental health services,” the criminologist David Wilson told Wired in 2013. “For all intents and purposes these were loving husbands and good fathers, often holding down high profile jobs and seen publicly as being very, very successful. They were simply not on the radar.” In many cases, the precipitating circumstance is some kind of financial disgrace. The impulse to murder one’s family, Wilson has also argued , is tied to “masculinity in crisis,” whereby patriarchs feel unmanned by their failures and can’t fathom their wife and children functioning without them.
Tim—sinking into drug abuse and narcissistic despair, as mournful as a donkey in a spa robe—has hovered over The White Lotus like a heavy black cloud. Isaacs is a terrific actor, but I haven’t been able to figure out how we’re supposed to read Tim’s looming defeatism. When Tim watches his wife hug his daughter in the finale, the former hugely relieved that the latter is too spoiled to commit to a Buddhism retreat, are his slight eyebrow raise and confused expression, seemingly an acknowledgment that now he might have to murder them both, supposed to be comedic? When, ashen and lifeless, he tells his youngest son, “It’s your last day. Don’t just sit in here,” is Isaacs delivering a wry wink? Tim’s speech to his family over poisoned drinks is stupidly simple: “I couldn’t ask for a more perfect family. We’ve had a perfect life, haven’t we? No privations, no suffering, no trauma. And my job is to keep all that from you. To keep you safe. I love you. I love you so much.” But it also reads as the thesis statement of someone who apparently would rather see his family dead than have their high opinions of him diminished.
This is, it has to be emphasized, very dark material for mainstream television. For the majority of the season, Mike White, the show’s creator, has teased Tim’s impulse to commit appalling acts, rendering his fantasies in bloody, realistic fashion. The character has sought out multiple ways to commit murder-suicide, first stealing a gun that he hides in a hotel room, and then asking Pam how best to avail oneself of something locals call “the suicide tree.” He goes so far as to harvest the poisonous seeds, grind them up in a blender, and mix cocktails for his wife and two of his children to drink, before changing his mind and dashing the drink out of his eldest son’s hand. When his youngest son, who collapses after making himself a protein smoothie using the still-toxic blender, opens his eyes in his father’s arms, is the moment supposed to be redemptive for Tim? Is he changed enough to be honest with his family about what he almost did to them? The show never lets us see.
[Read: The White Lotus doesn’t stick the landing ]
The final scenes of Season 3, which duck away from the Ratliffs before they find out that their money is gone and their father is likely going to prison, left me feeling almost more unsettled than Tim’s violent reveries. For weeks, The White Lotus played with a truly macabre storyline like a cat with a ball of string, pulling it out, chasing it around, knotting it up. If Tim had actually killed one of his loved ones, whether intentionally or by accident, it would have signaled something new about the show: a willingness to take its pessimism about human nature and karmic balance to a grim and brutal extreme. Maybe an HBO executive intervened. Maybe family annihilation is too bleak for a satirical comedy after all. But there’s something abject about taking up such a fraught subject, wringing every ounce of suspense and dramatic potential out of it, and then backing away as though Tim’s arc is just another story of sad enlightenment.
Measles cases in Texas surpass 500 with 24 new infections confirmed over last 5 days
The measles outbreak in western Texas is continuing to grow with a total of 505 in the state, according to data published Tuesday.
Strong Jobs Report For March*
Amid the continued global market downturn (particularly US markets and dollar downturns ), supporters of the President got some good news. After two months of lower month-to-month job growth, initial reporting for March shows an increase in the number of new jobs. From NPR :
U.S. employers added 228,000 jobs in March. That’s about twice the number added the previous month, when revised figures show employers added 111,000 jobs. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2% from 4.1% in February, as 232,000 people joined or rejoined the workforce. [Source ]
Given how much Trump apologists are sharing this news, it’s great to know that we can once again trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s amazing how easily that faith comes when someone they like is in the White House.
As someone who has trusted those numbers (and their revisions) across both parties, job growth now and in the past is, of course, good news. Here’s to hoping that if revisions happen, they will only revise up. Only time will tell.
All that said, it sure seems like a lot of Trump supporters and the President himself are making a lot of causation/correlation errors in their interpretation of this news:
Granted, “IT’S ALREADY WORKING” can be interpreted in many ways (I look forward to our Trump whispers explanations). But coupled with “HANG TOUGH” (i.e., don’t panic over the last 48 hours), it sure seems like part of the “IT’s” that is “ALREADY” (as in right now) “WORKING” are the Tariffs that dropped two days ago.
Unless you are willing to advance the theory that companies started to hire in March based on market-crushing tariffs that would be implemented on the second day of the following month, this really feels like a correlation error.
Then again, I guess only time will tell. One good thing about the Trump tariffs is that the President had the presence of mind to start them on the second day of April. That means, except for April 1st, this month’s jobs report will almost exclusively include data from what happens after the tariffs were announced.
I’m wondering if any of our readers want to bet that the April jobs report will show the same level of growth as this month.
Weeping husband’s chilling police interview before he ‘murdered’ wife while ‘pretending to be her stalker’
Jurors heard evidence during the second day of trial for Daniel Krug, 44, who is on trial in Colorado for murder, stalking and criminal impersonation