Temperature today: 90C The threats are continuing to build, even as numerous court cases go against Trump and the Republicans

As Jack Reacher and many others like to say, “Hope for the best, and plan for the worst.” Currently lots of Dems seem to be hoping for the best and planning for the best, i.e. business as usual. Maybe they’re doing more behind the scenes but if so they are being awfully modest about it.

One warning today comes from Sabrina Haake, a widely published federal trial attorney with more than 25 years of experience. She presents the hypothesis that Trump is stoking racial tensions in order to have an excuse to impose martial law. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/23/2323897/-Trump-is-inciting-racial-violence-as-predicate-to-martial-law?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

This needs to be publicly and seriously debated.

Erwin Chermerinsky, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, writes in Just Security about the part of the House-passed budget reconciliation bill that would block the courts from enforcing their own orders. “In fact, the greatest effect of adopting the provision would be to make countless existing judicial orders unenforceable.  If enacted, judges will be able to set the bond at $1 so it can be easily met.  But all existing judicial orders where no bond was required would become unenforceable.” (https://www.justsecurity.org/113529/terrible-idea-contempt-court/)

This is not yet law because the bill must pass the Senate, and that timetable is currently expected to be July at the earliest. Senators need to hear from us and get rid of that little item. Presumably the courts could save themselves by striking this down, but they are being put to the test already, and we should be doing everything we can to not put further burdens on them.

Final thing for today: Paul Krugman decided to respond to the No Good Big Horrible Bill by thinking about the positive: what a good, responsible Congress would do.

“So what I thought I’d do today is talk about what might be happening now if the party controlling Congress and the White House consisted of decent people — not saints, but at least people who genuinely cared about the welfare of their constituents and the future of the nation.

One option, of course, would have been for Congress to do nothing. That, itself, would have been a big improvement on what actually went down.

But Congress could and should do more. You don’t have to be a deficit fetishist, a fiscal scold — which I definitely am not — to realize that even before the Budget of Abominations America was on an unsustainable fiscal path. So what will it take to get back to a tolerable fiscal position?”

We should all be spending some time thinking about the positives: what the government we want would look like. Even if we regain power tomorrow, we’re not going back to what was — so we had better think about where we want to go forward to.