Under Trump pressure, ABA poised to suspend law school DEI rule into 2026
May 6 (Reuters) - The American Bar Association is set to extend the suspension of its law school diversity and inclusion rule through August 2026 as the organization faces mounting pressure from the Trump administration to abandon it diversity efforts.
The ABA's Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar on Friday will consider a recommendation, opens new tab to further defer enforcement of its longstanding diversity rule, which was first suspended in February after President Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders meant to curtail DEI efforts in the government, the private sector and in higher education.
The higher education landscape 'continues to change rapidly,' said Jenn Rosato Perea, the ABA's managing director of accreditation and legal education. 'These changes create extreme hardship for law schools seeking to comply with the law and with the accreditation standards,' she said on Tuesday, adding that the ABA will not evaluate law schools' compliance with the diversity rule while it remains suspended.
The ABA has faced added pressure since it suspended the diversity rule, which involves law schools' demonstration of their commitment to diversity in recruitment, admissions and programming. Attorney General Pam Bondi in March warned the ABA that its role as the federally recognized accreditor of U.S. law schools — which it has held since 1952 — could be revoked if it did not repeal the DEI rule and scrap a planned revision of the standard, which she said are unlawful race and sex discrimination.
Trump in April signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to assess whether to suspend or terminate the ABA as the government's official law school accreditor, citing its 'unlawful 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' requirements,' as part of an executive order focused on reforming higher education accreditation.
The high courts in Texas and Florida have both said in recent weeks that they are reviewing their ABA-graduation requirement, with the Florida justices citing the ABA's former law school diversity and inclusion rule.
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STV News
31 minutes ago
- STV News
Trump says he 'may or may not' strike Iran as US evacuates diplomats from Israel
Donald Trump warned he had run out of patience with the leadership in Tehran, as ITV News Senior International Correspondent John Irvine reports The United States has begun evacuating the families of diplomats from Israel, as President Donald Trump considered whether to join Israel's strikes on Iran's nuclear sites. When asked about the possibility of direct US involvement, Trump told reporters: 'I may do it, I may not do it.' The president has insisted he doesn't want the US to get involved in a war with Iran, but he conceded on Wednesday it may not be avoidable if he wants to stop Tehran's nuclear programme. He told reporters: 'I'm not looking to fight. But if it's a choice between fighting and them having a nuclear weapon, you have to do what you have to do.' At another point, Trump said: 'You may have to fight.' Soon after Trump spoke from the White House, US officials told the Associated Press a government plane had evacuated a number of diplomats and family members who had asked to leave the country on Wednesday. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee also announced on X that the embassy was making plans for evacuation flights and ships for private American citizens. Trump's comments come as the rhetoric between the US and Iran heated up in recent days, with Tehran saying American involvement would be 'a recipe for an all-out war in the region'. Earlier on Wednesday, Israel launched another attack against Iran, with local Iranian media reporting numerous casualties at the national police headquarters. Iran also claimed to have launched another drone strike against Israel on Wednesday, but did not give any details of what it was targeting. Social media users in Iran also reported that regular broadcasts on state TV were briefly interrupted and replaced with an anti-government video urging people to take to the streets, with Tehran later saying it had been the victim of an Israeli cyberattack. Speaking on Wednesday, Trump also repeated his demands for 'unconditional surrender' before adding he had 'had it' with the Iranian leadership. The comment came as Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered his second public comments since Israel launched its attack against Iran last week and said US intervention would 'undoubtedly result in irreparable damage.' Trump also said on Wednesday that the Iranian officials continue to reach out to the White House as they're 'getting the hell beaten out of them' by Israel. But he added there's a 'big difference between now and a week ago' in Tehran's negotiating position. 'They've suggested that they come to the White House – that's, you know, courageous,' Trump said. 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It was also reported that the internet had gone down across the country. Addressing the developing situation in the Middle East, Sir Keir Starmer chaired an emergency Cobra meeting on Wednesday after returning from the G7. It is understood that one topic discussed was whether the UK would approve the US using the military base in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or the British base in Cyprus to launch air strikes on Iran. The meeting came as the Foreign Office confirmed families of British diplomatic staff in Israel have been 'temporarily withdrawn' as Tel Aviv and Tehran continued to exchange fire. If you are a UK citizen currently in Israel or the Occupied Palestinian Territories, let the Foreign Office know here. Britons have already been advised against all travel to Israel, and those already in the country have been urged to register their presence with the embassy. Earlier in the week, Downing Street said the UK had no plans to evacuate British nationals stranded in Israel but had increased support in Jordan and Egypt for people making their own way out of the country overland. Israel has maintained that these strikes were necessary to degrade Iran's nuclear programmes, despite appearing to put a premature end to talks of a nuclear deal with the US. Iran has insisted its nuclear programme was peaceful, though it was the only non-nuclear-armed state to enrich uranium up to 60%, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. ITV News filmed Israel's air defence system intercepting Iranian missiles over Tel Aviv early Wednesday morning Israel does not publish regular death tolls, but one human rights group said the strikes in Iran had killed at least 585 people and wounded 1,326 others. The Washington-based group Human Rights Activists said it had identified 239 of those killed in Israeli strikes as civilians and 126 as security personnel. The group, which also provided detailed casualty figures during the 2022 protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, cross-checks local reports in the Islamic Republic against a network of sources it has developed in the country. Iran has retaliated against Israel, launching over 400 missiles and hundreds of drones at Israel. So far, 24 people have been killed in Israel. Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
Telegraph
41 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Trump might be about to plunge the whole Middle East to war
Reports that US president Donald Trump has authorised military action against Iran represents a significant escalation in the deepening crisis over the latest war to engulf the Middle East. According to reports circulating in the US media, the US leader gave private instructions to military chiefs in the situation room inside the White House on Wednesday. At the same time, Trump is insisting in public that he has made no final decision on whether or not to strike Iran, telling reporters: 'I have ideas on what to do but I haven't made a final – I like to make the final decision one second before it's due.' Nevertheless, the fact that Trump is giving serious consideration to launching military strikes against Iran with the aim of neutralising its nuclear programme marks a serious escalation in the deepening conflict over Iran's nuclear ambitions, which most Western intelligence agencies believe is ultimately aimed at producing nuclear weapons. It was the recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN-sponsored body responsible for monitoring Iran's nuclear activities, that concluded Tehran has acquired sufficient stockpiles of enriched uranium to produce at least 10 nuclear warheads. This was what prompted Israel to launch its devastating assault on Iran's nuclear infrastructure last week. Since then Israel and Iran have become involved in a deadly conflict, with Israeli warplanes regularly attacking Iran's nuclear and military infrastructure, while Iran has responded by launching barrages of missiles and drones. In Iran's latest missile attack against Israel overnight, a hospital was struck by a missile in southern Israel. The distinct possibility that the US military could become involved in this conflict would therefore take it to an entirely new level, one that raises the prospect of a wider conflict involving the entire Middle East. Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has made it clear that the US would suffer 'irreparable damage' if it became involved in the conflict; Tehran is likely to launch attacks against US military and diplomatic bases in the region if Trump follows through on his threat. The very idea that Trump could authorise military action against Iran goes against his constant campaign pledge during the presidential election that he wanted to end America's 'forever wars' in the Middle East. The main reason the US military might become involved in the conflict is that it is the only Western nation that has the capability to destroy one of Iran's key nuclear facilities, the Fordo complex which is located deep underground in a mountain range. To conduct such a mission the US would need to deploy one of its Massive Ordnance Perpetrator (MOD) bombs, the only munition capable of destroying the facility. But by doing so, Trump runs the risk of provoking a major conflict between the ayatollahs and the West.
The Guardian
43 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘He's moving at a truly alarming speed': Trump propels US into authoritarianism
It reads like a checklist of milestones on the road to autocracy. A succession of opposition politicians, including Alex Padilla, a US senator, are handcuffed and arrested by heavy-handed law enforcement for little more than questioning authority or voicing dissent. A judge is arrested in her own courthouse and charged with helping a defendant evade arrest. Masked snatch squads arrest and spirit people away in public in what seem to be consciously intimidating scenes. The president deploys the military on a dubious legal premise to confront protesters contesting his mass roundups of undocumented migrants. A senior presidential aide announces that habeas corpus – a vital legal defence for detainees – could be suspended. The sobering catalogue reflects the actions not of an entrenched dictatorship, but of Donald Trump's administration as the president's sternest critics struggle to process what they say has been a much swifter descent into authoritarianism than they imagined even a few weeks ago. 'Trump is throwing authoritarian punches at a much greater rate than any of these other cases in their first year in power,' said Steven Levitsky, Harvard political scientist and author, with Daniel Ziblatt, of How Democracies Die. 'But we don't yet know how many of those punches will land or how society will respond.' Five months after Trump's inauguration, seasoned analysts with years of studying one-time stable democracies degenerating into autocracies are voicing alarm at the speed of the Trump administration's authoritarian assault on institutions and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of expression. They are unnerved by the deployment of masked Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents – dressed in plain clothes and without identifying official insignia – to arrest people on the streets for deportation, a tactic critics say is evocative of dictatorships and designed to provoke fear among the general population. Some voice doubts about the judiciary's capacity to act as a democratic safeguard, despite a wave of legal challenges to the president's executive orders. They cite the 6-3 conservative majority of the US supreme court, which has a history of issuing rulings friendly to the president, who appointed three of its justices to the bench during his first administration. Trump has tried to propel the US in an authoritarian direction with greater intensity than noted autocrats like the late Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, or Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister, according to Levitsky. Eric Rubin, a former US ambassador to Bulgaria and acting ambassador to Moscow, said Trump was outpacing Vladimir Putin, the Russia president for whom he had often voiced admiration. 'This is going faster than Putin even came close to going in terms of gradually eliminating democratic institutions and democratic freedoms,' said Rubin, who witnessed Putin's early years in power at close quarters. 'It took him years. We're not even looking at six months here.' Bright Line Watch, a survey of political scientists, recently gave the US a score of 53 – the lowest since it started collecting data in 2017 – on a spectrum ranging from 0 for total dictatorship to 100, denoting a perfect democracy, according to Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College, one of the institutions conducting the study. Academics commissioned said they expected the country to fall further, forecasting a score of 48 by 2027. 'We're in the range of countries like Brazil and Israel, but well above countries like Russia,' said Nyhan. 'I do expect things to get worse. The potential for further democratic erosion is very real.' Key to whether Trump can tilt America decisively into authoritarianism will be his efforts to assert control over the armed forces, argued Levitsky. 'Trump's ramping up of the effort to politicize the military can still go in multiple directions,' he said. 'It could be really ugly and bad, because the only way that you can get from where we are to real authoritarianism like Nicaragua or Venezuela or Russia is if Trump has the military and security forces on his side, and he's taken steps in that direction.' Padilla's manhandling – after he tried to question homeland security secretary Kristi Noem at a news conference – drew fierce scrutiny. It took place against a backdrop of Trump's deployment of 4,000 national guard troops on to the streets of Los Angeles, later augmented by 700 active marines, against demonstrators protesting against the administration's anti-migrant crackdown, who did not appear to be present an undue challenge to local law enforcement authorities. The decisions took place against the opposition of California's governor, Gavin Newsom, who would normally be empowered to deploy the national guard in the state but whose role Trump usurped as he sought to make an example of a state with a large immigrant population and whose Democratic stranglehold he wishes to break. The deployments, denounced by opponents as an attempt to foment violent confrontation, took place in the run-up to a military parade staged in Washington last Saturday. Ostensibly held to honor the US army's 250th anniversary, the event was held – perhaps not coincidentally – on the president's 79th birthday. Opponents said it was redolent of autocracies like China, North Korea and Russia and reflected a desire by Trump to turn the military into his personal tool. Amid speculation that the parade might be disrupted by an anti-Trump No Kings protest on the same day, the president threatened to use 'very big force' against demonstrators, in apparent contradiction of the US's tradition of tolerance of peaceful dissent. In the event, no clashes between government forces and protesters were reported at the Washington parade on a day when an estimated 5 million demonstrators turned out at 2,100 locations across the US, according to organizers. However, there were sporadic reports of violence elsewhere; in northern Virginia, a man drove his car through a crowd of No Kings protesters, striking one, in what police said was an intentional act. But in a much worse portent for democracy on the same day, Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was shot dead at her home along with her husband Mark in what was called a targeted political assassination allegedly carried out by 57-year-old Vance Boelter, whose friends say was a Christian nationalist Trump supporter. Boelter, who is now in police custody, is suspected of then shooting and wounding another politician, John Hoffman – a Democratic member of the Minnesota senate – and his wife, Yvette. He is said to have had a list with more than 45 targets, all of them Democrats, at the time of his arrest. Rubin said the shootings created a climate of fear comparable to that of Weimar Germany before the rise of Hitler. 'Fear is powerful and pernicious,' he said. 'People won't be willing to to be candidates for these positions because they're afraid. The general public is intimidated. I'm somewhat intimidated. 'You can say passivity is immoral in the face of evil, that it is complicity, all the things that were said about Nazi Germany. Well, it's easy to say that. In Nazi Germany, there were some courageous people, but not very many, because they were afraid.' Equally significant, analysts say, is the Trump administration's efforts to expand the legal boundaries of the president's powers – the fate of which will be decided by the supreme court, which issued a ruling last year that effectively granted Trump vast prosecutorial immunity for acts committed in office. 'Has Trump solidified his power? Have we reached a point where we have an out-of-control president who controls all the institutions? No, but we're at the 11th hour,' said Kim Lane Scheppele, a sociology and international affairs professor at Princeton University. 'He's moving at a truly alarming speed and pressing all the authoritarian buttons. We're a few supreme court decisions away from having a president we can't get rid of.' Trump's national guard deployments in Los Angeles may have been aimed at establishing a legal precedent enabling him to deploy troops at will when state authorities tried to defy him. 'He wants to establish that he can disable the governors from fighting back against him [by using] military force,' Scheppele said. 'The Los Angeles deployment was perceived as an escalation but in reality, the military haven't done that much. However, there's a legal infrastructure underneath it all that's scarier.' Levitsky, said the administration – spearheaded by Stephen Miler, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff – had adopted a practice of declaring emergencies to acquire potentially dictatorial powers. 'In the US constitution, almost every existing constraint on executive power can be circumvented in a state of emergency,' he said. 'And it's becoming clear that the administration is learning that emergencies are the easiest route to circumvent the law and not be blocked by the courts. The supreme court is very reluctant to say, 'No, that's not an emergency, Trump, you lied. You made that up.' It's sort of a free pass for circumventing the rule of law.' The White House used economic emergency legislation to impose sweeping trade tariffs, while invoking the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act, passed in anticipation of a war with France, to justify summarily deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members. Miller repeatedly called last week's protests in Los Angeles an 'insurrection', implicitly justifying the invocation of the Insurrection Act, which enables a president to use military forces to quash a rebellion on US soil. Writing in the Atlantic, David Frum, an anti-Trump conservative commentator, warned that the penchant for emergencies could be applied to next year's congressional elections, when the Democrats hope to regain control of the House of Representatives, an outcome that could curtail his authoritarian power grab. 'Trump knows full well that the midterms are coming. He is worried,' Frum wrote. 'He might already be testing ways to protect himself that could end in subverting those elections' integrity. So far, the results must be gratifying to him – and deeply ominous to anyone who hopes to preserve free and fair elections in the United States under this corrupt, authoritarian, and lawless presidency.' Even if Trump were to suffer an election reverse, his ability to wreak further havoc will remain, Nyhan warned, simply because Senate Republicans are unlikely to vote in sufficient numbers to remove him from office in the event of him being impeached by a Democratic-controlled House. 'The Founding Fathers anticipated Trump precisely,' he said, referring to the constitutional provision to try and remove a president and other officials for 'high crimes and misdemeanors'. 'It was just assumed that Congress will jealously guard its prerogatives and impeach and remove any president who exceeded the boundaries of the constitution. But in our current political system, that is a seemingly impossible task. 'So we face the prospect of a lawless authoritarian continuing to act for the next three and a half years, and there's a great deal of damage he can do in that time.'
