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Declassified intel memo contradicts Trump's claim that Venezuela directs gang
Declassified intel memo contradicts Trump's claim that Venezuela directs gang

Yahoo

time06-05-2025

  • Politics
  • Yahoo

Declassified intel memo contradicts Trump's claim that Venezuela directs gang

President Trump says he can use the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged criminal immigrants without due process because the U.S., he argues, is at war with a gang that is directed by Venezuela. However, the intelligence agencies say there is not enough evidence for this. MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin and New York Times DHS and Immigration Reporter Hamed Aleaziz join Katy Tur to discuss.

Jamal Greene: I'm a legal scholar. We're in a constitutional crisis — and this is the moment it began.
Jamal Greene: I'm a legal scholar. We're in a constitutional crisis — and this is the moment it began.

Yahoo

time26-04-2025

  • Politics
  • Yahoo

Jamal Greene: I'm a legal scholar. We're in a constitutional crisis — and this is the moment it began.

This is an adapted excerpt from MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin's YouTube series 'Can They Do That? With Lisa Rubin.' A constitutional crisis is a moment where there is some kind of paralysis, or possibly abuse, of the Constitution that has no obvious solution. There's no question that, under the leadership of Donald Trump, that's exactly the moment America is in right now. Some will argue that this country entered into a constitutional crisis only recently, when the administration was accused of disobeying a Supreme Court order regarding the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but it came before that. If the administration can't constrain itself from violating the Constitution or statutes so flagrantly and frequently, then the country is already in a place where a constitutional crisis has occurred. The truth is, we've been in a constitutional crisis since the executive branch decided it wouldn't pay attention to any internal legal constraints. As someone who served in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, I spent a lot of time during Joe Biden's administration advising what the president could and couldn't do. So much of what the executive branch does is things that will never get to a court. It's up to the White House to constrain itself. The moment I realized we were in a constitutional crisis was Jan. 20. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. It's an order that is flagrantly unconstitutional. It doesn't have any real legal defense. The Trump administration knows that, but they issued it anyway. That kind of behavior — 'I'm going to do it unless and until someone tells me not to, and that someone is a court that's going to act slowly' — shows me that we've got an executive branch that doesn't see itself constrained by law. That's incredibly dangerous. Trump's actions are breaking a long tradition of the executive branch policing itself. Across administrations, executive branch officials, including career employees, have held up this tradition. One of the very first moves of this administration was to try to get rid of as many of those people as possible. That's a pretty good sign that they're not trying to constrain themselves. Now, I'm not saying they're completely unconstrained. There are political constraints on the president's behavior. He can't just do whatever he wants. But there is so much that the executive branch does that will never see a courtroom. Or if it does see a courtroom, the way in which the court is able to intervene is very narrow. That's what we're seeing right now with the Supreme Court and the deportation of Abrego Garcia. The White House is playing with what the court has told it, knowing that it holds a lot of the cards. The court doesn't have an army. It can't march into El Salvador, and the Trump administration is taking advantage of that. This situation has taken this constitutional crisis even further into the red. At some point, people might stop paying attention because there's so much lawlessness happening. But right now, we have an administration that is unconstrained by any internal legal constraints and flirting with ignoring the Supreme Court. This is really unprecedented territory. This article was originally published on

DOGE tramples on a key part of government accountability. That's no accident.
DOGE tramples on a key part of government accountability. That's no accident.

Yahoo

time23-04-2025

  • Politics
  • Yahoo

DOGE tramples on a key part of government accountability. That's no accident.

This is an adapted excerpt from MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin's YouTube series 'Can They Do That? With Lisa Rubin.' With the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have launched an assault on state capacity. Conservatives say they want to attack the administrative state, but the administrative state is just another word for government. When we think about the United States government, the Constitution actually doesn't say very much about what that government is supposed to look like. But over the course of the last two centuries, different problems have arisen at the federal level, and in response to each of those problems, Congress has had to create different kinds of institutions, or agencies. If we think of the sum of all those agencies together, that's what makes the administrative state. Most of these agencies have been created by statute and follow a similar process: A problem presents itself, and Congress passes a law. But when it comes to DOGE, the Trump administration did not follow this process. When Trump first announced his intent to start DOGE, a lot of us in the administrative law world thought there was nothing to worry about because, typically, he would have to pass a law to create a new agency. But instead, the administration came up with a backdoor. They took the U.S. Digital Service, hollowed it out and turned it into DOGE. And now, they are using DOGE as a vehicle to allow the president to exercise unprecedented control over how our government agencies operate. Transparency is a key part of the administrative state. You have to be able to see what an agency is doing and grasp what it's up to. In DOGE's case, we have the opposite of that. We don't know what the structure of the agency is, we don't know what its responsibilities are, we don't know what its mission is, and we don't know what laws it is implementing. As we see court cases against DOGE make their way through the legal system, it sure seems like some of their actions are transparently illegal, or at the very least in real tension with the spirit of the law. Some of the biggest fights in American political history have been about the tools presidents use to control the administrative state. While the judicial branch is putting up a fight against DOGE and checking the president's power, Congress appears to be letting Trump do whatever he wants. This is emblematic of a much deeper problem in American politics, which is that the vision of the Constitution that we all learned in school, the one with three branches that are supposed to counterbalance one another, is not our reality in practice. Instead, as professors Daryl J. Levinson and Richard H. Pildes wrote in their article, "Separation of Parties, Not Powers," what we actually know about American politics is that the separation of powers seems to matter less than the party allegiance across the different branches of government. For better or worse, DOGE is the embodiment of the will of the current Republican Party, which is deeply hostile to the federal government and anti-administrative state. So even as the courts are getting involved to try to stop DOGE and its damage, the real break here isn't going to be a court declaring what they're doing as illegal. It's going to be the American people recognizing what Trump and his administration are doing to our system of government and fighting back. This article was originally published on

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