Citizen Cartwright

Celebrating the compassion and humility of Pope Francis

“He was a pope among the people, with an open heart toward everyone,” said Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals, in his homily during the pope’s funeral on Saturday.

“His gestures and exhortations in favor of refugees and displaced persons are countless. His insistence on working on behalf of the poor was constant,” Re said.

Francis “strongly supported” transforming the Vatican post office into a free medical clinic for the homeless and undocumented migrants, where it averages 100 visits a day, says The New York Times. Showers for the homeless were set up near the clinic, along with tents distributed by an office of papal charities.

In 2019, Francis blessed a four-story Vatican property behind St. Peter’s Basilica as he opened a shelter that provides housing for about 50 people, says the Times. The pope often ate with the homeless and invited them to annual concerts at the Vatican.

The pope “gave immense emphasis to aid to the poor, not just the poor in Rome, but the poor around the world,” says Carlo Santoro of the Sant’Egidio Community, a Rome-based charity that runs the building, citing trips by a cardinal to take supplies to Ukraine. The most recent trip was earlier this month.

The pope also was outspoken about prison conditions, and one of his final public outings, four days before his death, was to visit inmates at Rome’s Regina Coeli prison.

I hope you have a second to click on this photo of the joy of the inmates as the pope greeted them.

The last people to bid farewell to the pope after the funeral mass at St. Peter’s and just before his burial on Saturday were a group of poor, homeless, migrant, transgender, and incarcerated people, each of them holding a white rose. The idea was that all the pope’s favorite people would be accompanying him in his final journey, says Vatican News. 

Both sides find good news in Supreme Court ruling on deportations

The Monday ruling means the Trump administration can try to resume deportations under the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act, as long as detainees are given due process, says NBC News.

The ruling is 5-4, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett dissenting in part with the three liberal justices.

The ruling doesn’t address the constitutionality of using the Alien Enemies Act to send the migrants to a prison in El Salvador. The justices instead have issued a narrow procedural ruling, saying that the migrants’ lawyers filed their lawsuit in the wrong court, says The New York Times.

The justices say it should have been filed in Texas, where Venezuelans are being held, rather than in Washington.

The court's unsigned majority opinion says, “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.” 

The decision lifts orders issued by Washington-based U.S. District Judge James Boasberg. The original lawsuit was filed by five Venezuelans, with Boasberg provisionally certifying it as a class action that applies to all Venezuelans in U.S. custody who aren't U.S. citizens.

A habeas proceeding ordinarily can only be used by a single individual to challenge their detention by the government. That means judges only can bar detention on a person-by-person basis, says Vox.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor says in a 17-page dissent that “individuals who are unable to secure counsel, or who cannot timely appeal an adverse judgment rendered by a habeas court, face the prospect of removal directly into the perilous conditions of El Salvador’s [Center for Terrorism Confinement], where detainees suffer egregious human rights abuses.”

Habeas proceedings have to be brought in the place where the person seeking relief is detained, says Vox. So far, the Trump administration has transferred prisoners it intends to deport under the Alien Enemies Act to Texas, which is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

“The Fifth Circuit is the most right-wing court in the federal appellate system. If someone brings a habeas suit in its jurisdiction, and the decision is appealed to the Fifth Circuit, the court could hand down a precedent that means any habeas proceedings challenging these deportations would fail,” Vox says.

In the likely event that the Fifth Circuit denies relief to the people Trump seeks to deport, one of them is likely to seek Supreme Court review of whether the Alien Enemies Act can be used by Trump to deport people, Vox says.

As far as reactions, Attorney General Pam Bondi says on X: “An activist judge in Washington, D.C. does not have the jurisdiction to seize control of President Trump’s authority to conduct foreign policy and keep the American people safe.”

Lee Gelernt, lead attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs who were deported, says that, overall, the group is pleased with the court's ruling.

“We are disappointed that we will need to start the court process over again in a different venue, but the critical point is that the court rejected the government’s remarkable position that it does not even have to give individuals meaningful advance notice to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act. That is a big victory.”

Trump’s legislative branch majority moves to shrink power of judicial branch

Angry about court rulings against the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress are proposing to limit the reach of the federal judiciary's rulings, cut funding and even impeach judges, tightening the GOP’s grip on government, says The Associated Press.

 

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said on Tuesday that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” without mentioning impeachment. 

 

“We do have authority over the federal courts,” Johnson said. “We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts, and all these other things.”

 

House GOP leaders met Tuesday with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which is to hold a hearing on the issue next week. 

 

The House also is expected to vote next week on a bill by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., that would limit the geographic reach of certain federal rulings, to prevent temporary restraining orders from being enacted nationwide. 

 

Passing Issa’s legislation on the House floor would be a less severe response than pursuing impeachment of Judge James Boasberg, a move called for by right-wing lawmakers and President Trump over the judge's rulings on the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.

 

“No federal judge has been impeached strictly for the outcome of a case,” says longtime New York Times congressional reporter Carl Hulse. “And even if the House were to summon the necessary majority to impeach a judge, persuading the required 67 senators to convict and remove a judge over a ruling would be highly unlikely.”

 

Fifteen federal judges have been impeached in the United States, and eight have been convicted and removed, mainly for criminal acts like bribery and conflicts of interest, Hulse says.

 

As far as cutting funding for the courts, the appropriations subcommittee that oversees that spending bill is chaired by Rep. Dave Joyce, R-Ohio, a former prosecutor, self-described pragmatist and one of the more moderate members of the House GOP conference, says NBC News.

 

And even if House Republicans managed to pass a defunding bill, the Senate almost certainly would reject it, NBC News says.

Legal scholars on whether there’s a constitutional crisis or not

After the Trump administration ignored a federal judge’s order not to deport a group of Venezuelan men, longtime New York Times legal reporter Adam Liptak contacted legal scholars on whether the clash between President Trump and the judiciary amounts to a constitutional crisis.

 

“If anyone is being detained or removed based on the administration’s assertion that it can do so without judicial review or due process,” says Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia, “the president is asserting dictatorial power and ‘constitutional crisis’ doesn’t capture the gravity of the situation.”

 

Trump raised the stakes Tuesday by calling for the impeachment of the judge who issued the order, James Boasberg of the Federal District Court in Washington, describing him on social media as a “Radical Left Lunatic.”

 

An Associated Press profile of Boasberg says his reputation among colleagues is “as a principled jurist with bipartisan respect — he was appointed to the federal bench in 2011 by President Barack Obama but was named a decade earlier to a seat on the D.C. Superior Court by President George W. Bush.”

 

A few hours after Trump’s statement, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a statement saying, “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

 

Aziz Huq, a law professor at the University of Chicago, says assessing whether a given development is a constitutional crisis is “generally unhelpful.”

“I think it’s more useful to say that this is moving us into a completely different kind of constitutional order, one that’s no longer characterized by laws that bind officials and that can be enforced,” Huq says. “The law, in other words, becomes a tool to harm enemies, but not to bind those who govern. That is a quite different constitutional order from the one that we’ve had for a long time.”

 

Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, wrote in the right-leaning National Review, “It’s all right to complain bitterly about court orders, but they are not to be ignored, much less knowingly flouted.”

The administration has chosen a different path, McCarthy wrote: “The government seems to be intentionally instigating fireworks. That seems like a terrible legal strategy, but it may be winning politics ... at least for a little while.”

 

Asked whether the United States has reached a tipping point plunging it into a constitutional crisis, Pamela Karlan, a law professor at Stanford, questioned the premise. “‘Tipping point’ suggests a world in which things are fine until suddenly they’re not,” she says. “But we’re past the first point already.”

 

Greene, the Columbia professor, says, “An executive branch that operates without internal legal constraint but solely on the basis of its ability to get away with things, whether politically or legally, is itself sufficient to produce a constitutional crisis. A president who does whatever he wants until someone stops him is a constitutional crisis whether or not he is sometimes stopped.”

Trump wrote on social media last month: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Trump’s speech to Congress

“President Trump, in his address to Congress Tuesday, celebrated the whirlwind of changes he has brought to the federal government. His success from this point on will depend largely on whether Americans believe the unease caused by his speedy actions — an unsettled stock market, a trade war with allies and uncertainty over the extent of federal job and spending cuts — will lead to the American renewal he promised,” says The Wall Street Journal.

 

Much of the 100-minute speech — the longest presidential address to Congress in modern history — “was filled with grievances about his treatment by Democrats and exaggerations about his accomplishments,” says The New York Times.

 

AP says the speech “added up to a defiant sales pitch for the policies that Trump promised during his campaign and leaned into during his first weeks back in office. Trump pledged to keep delivering sweeping change to rescue the nation from what he described as destruction and mistakes left by his predecessor. He seldom addressed his comments directly to the American people, who are trying to keep up with the recent upheaval, while repeatedly needling the Democratic lawmakers seated before him.”

 

Republicans chanted “USA! USA!” as Trump stepped to the lectern.

 

Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, who pushed to impeach Trump dating to his previous term in office, stood and shook his cane toward the president in the opening minutes of his speech and subsequently was removed from the chamber.

 

Some Democrats held black signs that read “save Medicaid,” “protect veterans,” “Musk steals” and “false."

 

Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who delivered the Democratic response after Trump’s speech, said “America wants change, but there’s a responsible way to make change and a reckless way, and we can make that change without forgetting who we are as a country and as a democracy.”

 

Here is reaction to the speech from experts at the Atlantic Council.

 

My thanks to my husband for compiling fact checks of Trump's speech:

 

AP

 

NYTimes

 

Washington Post

 

PolitiFact

 

ABC News

 

CBS News

 

NBC News

 

NPR

 

CNN

 

BBC News

Trump is inaugurated, issues promised deluge of executive orders

The president, flanked by his family and tech billionaires, delivered a second inaugural address on Monday that “promised massive national success, pledging an expansion of U.S. territory and an end to foreign wars, with a sweeping indictment of the status quo,” as The Associated Press puts it.

 

Trump’s aides had said the speech would focus on unity.

 

But with his presidential predecessors sitting nearby, by the third paragraph Trump was referring to “the vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government.”

 

In paragraph five: “For many years, the radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens. While the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair, we now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad.”

 

Shortly afterward, Trump spoke to supporters in another area of the Capitol and said he’d toned down his speech at the urging of his wife and his vice president.

 

The first of Trump’s executive orders rescinded 78 Biden actions, on topics including racial equity, gender discrimination, climate change, the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic, additional ethics requirements for political appointees, lowering prescription drug costs, sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and the withdrawal of offshore drilling from some areas, according to The Washington Post.

 

Other orders include:

 

— Ending birthright citizenship

— Declaring a “national emergency” on the southern border, among other things directing the military to make it priority to “seal the borders”

— Addressing the “cost-of-living crisis”

— Requiring federal workers to return to the office

— Freezing federal hiring

— Establishing the “Department of Government Efficiency”

— Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement

— Ending the “weaponization” of the federal government

— Delaying the ban on TikTok for 75 days

— Pardoning 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 others

— Officially recognizing two sexes

— Expanding energy production and temporarily stopping wind leasing, ending the “electric vehicle mandate”

— Withdrawing from the World Health Organization

— Starting the process to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America

— Declaring drug cartels terrorist organizations

 

Congress and the courts potentially can block executive orders, says a separate AP explainer.

 

Here is a transcript of Trump’s inaugural address, by AP.

 

Here is the text of the executive orders, from the White House.

A hopeful look at democracy

“Democracy is not facing a global extinction event” headlines a New York Times opinion article by longtime Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs reporter Serge Schmemann, who currently is a member of the Times editorial board.

“The election of Donald Trump and news of political turmoil in many other democracies has created the impression that liberal democracy is everywhere in retreat in the face of authoritarians feeding on discontent over economic woes, rapid social change, mass migration, disinformation and general malaise,” Schmemann says.

“But as The Times’s Berlin bureau chief Jim Tankersley suggested in a recent analysis of Germany’s plight, 'not all malaise is the same.' Popular discontent in Western democracies may have broadly similar sources, but the political consequences are as different as the leaders and systems in each country.” 

“Scanning the global political storms separately reveals their unique characteristics and challenges, and the way many are rooted more in a backlash against incumbent leaders than in a new embrace of the far right,” Schmemann says. 

And “the history of the United States — the lodestar of modern democracies — is hardly one of unity and harmony until the rise of Trumpism,” he says.

“That the threats to democracy are diverse may not be a great consolation to those worried about where it is headed, and there’s every reason to remain vigilant,” Schmemann says. “But it should be reassuring that democracy is not facing a global extinction event but more a patchwork of storms, and that democracies have usually found a way to weather them.”

House passes first bill of new Congress, on immigration

The Laken Riley Act would require the Department of Homeland Security to detain certain undocumented immigrants who've been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting. 

 

Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was killed last year in Georgia by a migrant who'd crossed into the United States illegally and was arrested and charged with shoplifting but wasn’t detained, The New York Times says.

 

All Republicans and 48 Democrats voted for the bill, according to the Times.

 

“Right now, ICE is unable to detain and deport the illegal criminals who commit these minor-level crimes,” said Rep. Mike Collins, R-Ga., the author of the bill, on the House floor, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We need to get these people off the street. These criminals are getting bolder and bolder while our communities become more unsafe.”

 

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., called the bill a “radical departure” from current law that for years has generally required mandatory detention only for criminal convictions or for admissions to having committed certain serious crimes.

A quick explainer of how we got to this political moment

Long-time journalist and National Book Award-winner George Packer offers us some context for our current political situation in an Atlantic article. Here are some excerpts:

 

“The Roosevelt Republic — the progressive age that extended social welfare and equal rights to a widening circle of Americans — endured from the 1930s to the 1970s. At the end of that decade, it was overthrown by the Reagan Revolution, which expanded individual liberties on the strength of a conservative free-market ideology, until it in turn crashed against the 2008 financial crisis. 

 

“The era that followed has lacked a convincing name and a clear identity. It’s been variously called the post–post–Cold War, post-neoliberalism, the Great Awokening, and the Great Stagnation. 

 

“But the 2024 election has shown that the dominant political figure of this period is Donald Trump, who, by the end of his second term, will have loomed over American life for as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dozen years as president. We are living in the Trump Reaction.”

 

“This new era is neither progressive nor conservative. The organizing principle in Trump’s chaotic campaigns, the animating passion among his supporters, has been a reactionary turn against dizzying change, specifically the economic and cultural transformations of the past half century: the globalization of trade and migration, the transition from an industrial to an information economy, the growing inequality between metropolis and hinterland, the end of the traditional family, the rise of previously disenfranchised groups, the ‘browning' of the American people." 

 

“For two and a half centuries American politics alternated between progressive and conservative periods, played between the 40-yard lines of liberal democracy. The values of freedom, equality, and rule of law at least received lip service; the founding documents enjoyed the status of civic scripture; the requisite American mood was optimism. 

 

“Although reaction has dominated local or regional (mainly southern) politics, it’s something new in our national politics — which explains why Trump has been misunderstood and written off at every turn. Reaction is insular and aggrieved, and it paints in dark tones. It wants to undo progress and reverse history, restoring the nation to some imagined golden age when the people ruled. They want a strongman with the stomach to trample on the liberal pieties of the elites who sold them out.

 

“This is why so many voters are willing to tolerate — in some cases, celebrate — Trump’s vile language and behavior; his love affairs with foreign dictators; his readiness to toss aside norms, laws, the Constitution itself. Asked by pollsters if they’re concerned about the state of democracy, these voters answer yes — not because they fear its demise, but because it has already failed them. They don’t think Trump will destroy democracy; he’ll restore it to the people.”

Democrats have prepared for 2 years for coming Trump actions

Democracy Forward, a liberal-leaning legal organization, has "unveiled a large-scale new effort aimed at thwarting President-elect Donald J. Trump’s second-term agenda from his first day in office," says The New York Times.

 

Unlike in 2017, when Democratic lawyers were unprepared for the onslaught of conservative policies, the intent is to be ready to unleash lawsuits immediately.

More than 800 lawyers at 280 organizations are developing cases and workshopping challenges to what the group has identified as 600 “priority legal threats” — potential regulations, laws and other administrative actions that could require a legal response, its leaders say. 

 

Democracy Forward has spent the last two years working to identify the possible actions the new Trump administration could take on issues they see as key priorities to defend, the group’s leaders say, using as a blueprint Trump’s first-term actions, his campaign promises and plans released by his allies, including the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 agenda.

Democracy Forward’s new project is called Democracy 2025. It’s focusing on issues including abortion rights, health care, climate change and other environmental protections, union protections and immigration. The group also has given particular weight to Trump’s promises to weaponize the systems of government, particularly the Justice Department, against those he sees as enemies, along with his pledges to dismantle federal agencies and fire thousands of government workers, the Times says.

 

The lawyers are preparing to challenge new regulations released by the Trump administration, even starting the process of recruiting potential plaintiffs who would have legal standing in court. They’re also exploring ways to take over the defense of Biden administration policies that are in litigation, such as student debt relief and women’s health protections, that now are being defended by the Justice Department and are unlikely to be continued under Trump.

Democracy Forward has "deep ties" to a number of prominent party strategists and lists election lawyer Marc Elias and Ron Klain, President Biden’s former White House chief of staff, as members of its board, says the Times.

 

The coalition has a multimillion-dollar war chest, according to the Times. Its partners include organizations such as unions, immigration advocacy organizations and groups working on abortion rights, civil rights and consumer protection.