Republicans are at it again, and it’s hard to overstate how chilling this is and what it tells you about the direction people in this Party want to take America.

Texas Congressman Chip Roy is preparing to introduce legislation he’s calling the “MAMDANI Act,” named after Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected democratic socialist mayor of New York City, that would let the federal government bar entry to, deport, and strip naturalized citizenship from any person who advocates for or is “affiliated with” what Roy calls “totalitarian” movements. The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage:

“[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.”

The bill targets people who “write, distribute, circulate, print, display, possess, or publish” material supporting socialism or any of those other ideas.

“Possess?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s Das Kapital, or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green-card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.”

“Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialist Party in New York that Mamdami ran on behalf of (along with the normal Democratic Party; New York has fusion voting so you can run on two parties simultaneously) from staying in America. Gone to a meeting, rally, or put yourself on their mailing list? You’re toast.

“Write?” That means they’re coming for me, and for you if you’ve ever echoed in writing the kind of sentiments that Republicans call socialism, including food stamps and school lunches, free college, public libraries, a national healthcare system, police and fire, and highways that don’t have tolls. (When billionaire David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on an antisocialism agenda, he called for the end of all these forms of “socialism”.)

“Distribute?” And they’d be coming for Substack, too, it appears. Along with your local bookstore or library.

We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when then-President John Adams had roughly 30 newspaper editors and publishers thrown in prison for attacking him. Ben Franklin’s grandson was arrested for publishing an op-ed calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” A town drunk in New Jersey was arrested for criticizing him while imbibing in a bar. Adams’ overreach lost him the election of 1800 to his then-political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who openly opposed the Acts.

But here we are again, and here’s another dangerous overreach on the GOP’s part in this legislation: Roy’s bill explicitly forbids judicial review of any inadmissibility, deportation, or denaturalization decision made under it.

In other words, if this law passes then no court can stop or second-guess the government: no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeals; just an order from the Attorney General or some twit at ICE or Homeland Security and you’re on a plane or stuck in a hellhole “detention facility,” possibly for the rest of your life.

That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state, and it’s modeled on how the Nazis stripped citizenship from German Jews and political dissidents in 1935 under the Reich Citizenship Laws.

I’ve walked through Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum, and the documents on display tell the horrific story of how that the lawyers who drafted those Nazi laws studied America’s own racial and political exclusion laws for inspiration.

Now Republican Chip Roy wants to bring them back to America as Republicans try to reinvent or country in the image of Trump’s mentor Putin’s Russia or — as the authors of Project 2025 openly suggest — Orbán’s Hungary.

The bill’s namesake, Mayor Mamdani, became a U.S. citizen in 2018 after moving here from Uganda as a child. He hasn’t been credibly accused of any crime, and as the Brennan Center for Justice meticulously documents, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the use of stripping people of their citizenship as a political weapon like Putin now routinely does and Trump loves to threaten.

That goes all the way back to trying to overturning the 1943 Schneiderman Supreme Court ruling, which held the government must prove “lack of attachment” to the Constitution by “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” evidence. Disagreeing with someone’s politics doesn’t cut it by a long shot. But Roy and his allies aren’t interested in the existing jurisprudence; they want to write new laws that nullify that decision (and common decency) altogether.

Roy told Breitbart his target is what he calls a “Red-Green Alliance” of socialists and Islamists, and a summary from his office goes further, claiming current immigration policies — echoing clearance Thomas‘s recent speech that I wrote about yesterday — have produced “dangerous levels of opposition to classical American political doctrines, like free-market capitalism.”

That’s an extraordinary admission, because Roy isn’t proposing to deport people who commit crimes, or who support terrorism, or even who lied on their citizenship applications. He wants, instead, to strip of citizenship and then deport people who don’t sufficiently believe in the unregulated, low-tax version of the so-called free market capitalism advocated by the rightwing billionaires who now own the GOP.

This is a loyalty test for an ideology rather than a country, and, as Thom Hartmann lays out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, it’s the kind of legislation the robber barons of the 1920s and the John Birchers and McCarthy movement of the 1950s dreamed of but could never ram through Congress and neither Taft nor Eisenhower would ever have signed.

We’ve actually run a smaller, more local version of this experiment before, and it ended in disgrace. The Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920 saw roughly 10,000 immigrants rounded up without warrants and 556 of them deported, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, all for the crime of holding the wrong politics.

The Communist Control Act of 1954 put into law by Republicans at the height of McCarthyism, was eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1973 and most of its provisions repealed. Each time we’ve tried this sort of neofascist thing the country looked back in shame, having relearned that the First Amendment doesn’t have an exception for people who say we should tax the morbidly rich to build and support a middle class.

History tells us, over and over again, that once you give the government the power to disappear people for what they read, write, believe, or advocate that power never stays trained just on the original targets.

There are nearly 25 million naturalized citizens and 12.8 million green-card holders living in the United States today, and every single one of them would, under Roy’s bill, be subject to having their citizenship reviewed and potentially revoked based on some rightwinger complaining about them to a federal bureaucrat or police agency or the discovery of a book in their house.

It would threaten millions of legal permanent residents and visa holders working in our hospitals, building our houses, teaching our children, designing our electronics, and even farming our food. The fear alone is the point: if you’re a naturalized citizen or green-card or visa holder and you want to attend a Free Palestine rally, a labor union meeting, or a tenants’ rights organizing session, you’d now have to ask yourself whether some aide in Stephen Miller’s office might decide that constitutes “advocacy for socialism.”

And it’s one of dozens of similar laws that have been proposed by Republicans in recent years.

Presumably, this is the sort of thing that the billionaire who funded JD Vance’s rise to the Senate and vice presidency meant when he famously said, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” That’s the billionaire whose company now compiles information on Americans on behalf of the Trump regime.

The media blackout of Jared Kushner’s historic, ongoing corruption scandal

https://popular.info/p/the-media-blackout-of-jared-kushners
Judd Legum — Popular Information

Everyone associated with the Trump administration, everyone who voted for that spawn of Satan is the scum of the earth:

The Trump administration has abruptly canceled an $11 million contract with Catholic Charities to shelter and care for migrant children who enter the U.S. alone, ending a relationship between the Catholic Church and the U.S. government dating back to the first arrivals of Cuban exiles in South Florida. The development comes amid rising tensions between the administration and American Catholics over President Donald Trump’s heated criticism of the Vatican’s first American pope, Leo XIV. The pontiff has made opposition to the U.S. war with Iran, as well as concern for the welfare of migrants, a cornerstone of his ministry.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the federal Department of Health and Human Services, has paid Catholic Charities in Miami for several years to house immigrant children who enter the U.S. without parents or adult supervision. The non-profit operates the equivalent of a federally funded foster care system, separate and apart from state agencies that have custody of abused and neglected children. The federal government reached out to the charity in late March about the cancellation of the funding. The Archdiocese of Miami said late Tuesday that Archbishop Thomas Wenski was not immediately available to discuss the contract’s cancellation or the Trump Administration’s rift with the church. But it shared a statement that Wenski, a longtime immigrant-rights advocate, wrote for the Miami Herald’s editorial board. “The U.S. government has abruptly decided to end more than 60 years of relationship with Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Miami,” Wenkski wrote. “The Archdiocese of Miami’s services for unaccompanied minors have been recognized for their excellence and have served as a model for other agencies throughout the country.” Wenski added: “Our track record in serving this vulnerable population is unmatched. Yet, the Archdiocese of Miami’s Catholic Charities’ services for unaccompanied minors has been stripped of funding and will be forced to shut down within three months.” . . .

Robert Latham, associate director of the University of Miami Law School’s Children and Youth Law Clinic, said any relocation to a new foster home or shelter likely would be traumatic for children who already have suffered uncertainty and loss. “It’s incredibly psychologically harmful to be moved,” sometimes as stressful as serious illness or a death in the family, Latham said. “For little kids, moving repeatedly creates bonding issues and destroys the sense of both self and community. They don’t know who they are and where they will be” from day to day. “This should only be done with a lot of emotional support that you normally would find within a family. Unfortunately, that is not there in a group home setting,” Latham added. The children who are uprooted “will lose the friends and connections and the community they have formed here.”

One day, and may that day come soon, Donald Trump will be out of power permanently. Everyone who supported him should never be forgiven, and that goes double for every pundit who claimed both-sides-do-it for all the atrocities of this criminal regime.

A delivery driver known as the “DoorDash Grandma” went viral after delivering McDonald’s to President Donald Trump at the Oval Office on Monday, April 13.

She denied she was hired for the job. “I am not a paid actor. My life is just like everybody else’s,” Simmons said Tuesday, April 14, on Fox & Friends.

The event was a staged photo-op meant to promote the first anniversary of the “No Tax on Tips” policy, which is part of Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

The woman was identified as Sharon Simmons, a 58-year-old grandmother of 10 and a full-time DoorDash driver from Fayetteville, Ark.

OH, BUT WAIT — THERE’S MORE.

   

There are signs the political game has changed in the United States since Hungarian voters rejected Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s leadership on Sunday, April 12. His party’s loss of control of the government to a supermajority of its opponents undermined the belief that right-wing authoritarianism was an unstoppable force in world politics. Since MAGA Republicans had tied themselves to Orbán and his movement, his loss also weakened their own claims to inevitable victory over those trying to protect democracy.

On Sunday night (April 12), President Donald J. Trump appeared to melt down on social media. In The Atlantic today, Tom Nichols noted that Trump’s “emotional state seems to be fraying: This weekend, he attacked Pope Leo XIV, presented himself as Jesus Christ, and then jabbed at his phone until dawn.” Nichols notes that after Trump attacked the Pope and portrayed himself as Jesus, he posted an AI version of a Trump Tower on the moon. (“Sure,” Nichols writes. “Why not?”)

Then Trump posted a meme of how senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former president Joe Biden all look old—unlike Trump—and then posted clips from Newsmax. The postings continued throughout the night. “This is not the behavior of a stable, healthy leader,” Nichols writes. “The American people must not look away…. They must pay attention to the president’s deterioration, and insist that the House and Senate start acting like functioning branches of the government by asking the White House to explain what is happening, without insults or evasions, before the eyes of the country and the world.”

Trump has tried to explain away the AI image he posted on social media on Sunday depicting himself as Jesus, clothed in robes, bathed in radiant light, and apparently healing a man in bed. After an extraordinary outcry over the image from his evangelical Christian followers, he took the image down, telling reporters “I thought it was me as a doctor” and claiming that “only the fake news” could suggest the image showed him as Jesus. He added: “I do make people better.”

With the House back in session today, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill to establish an independent commission to evaluate the president’s mental state. The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution establishes a process by which either a majority of the Cabinet or a majority of a body created by Congress to evaluate the president’s fitness can declare that a president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” In a press release, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee expressed concern about “Trump’s escalating erratic conduct.” The bill has fifty Democratic co-sponsors.

“Public trust in Donald Trump’s ability to meet the duties of his office has dropped to unprecedented lows as he threatens to destroy entire civilizations, unleashes chaos in the Middle East while violating Congressional war powers, aggressively insults the Pope of the Catholic Church and sends out artistic renderings online likening himself to Jesus Christ. We are at a dangerous precipice, and it is now a matter of national security for Congress to fulfill its responsibilities under the 25th Amendment to protect the American people from an increasingly volatile and unstable situation,” Raskin said in a statement.

Trump’s deteriorating mental state has become impossible to overlook, but Republicans are making excuses for it. Cabinet members, who owe their positions to Trump and who likely recognize they will never rise to such power again in a merit-based system, will probably not question Trump’s mental acuity. But Raskin’s measure will force Republicans in Congress either to vote for an independent commission to evaluate Trump or to own his increasingly erratic behavior themselves.

Today, when asked if he were comfortable with Trump’s threat of last week that an entire civilization would die if it did not meet his demands, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) changed the subject by saying: “You’ve got to…look at what the president is doing, and I think right now he’s trying to open the Strait of Hormuz, which…we are all supportive of.” The strait was, of course, open before Trump attacked Iran.

The Lincoln Project accused Republicans of “ignoring Trump’s sharp mental decline the same way they’ve ignored his crimes.”

Trump’s erratic behavior has led the U.S. into disaster by striking Iran, which in turn attacked its neighbors and closed the Strait of Hormuz. After unsuccessfully bullying other nations to force Iran to reopen the strait to all ships, not just to those of certain nations, Trump last week declared a ceasefire and a framework for an agreement, then suggested the U.S. and Iran would together manage the strait. When Iran continued to maintain control of it, Trump announced the U.S. would blockade the strait to make sure no ships at all could cross through it, with the idea that the U.S. can withstand the economic pain that closure will cause for a longer time than Iran can.

Data released today show that wholesale inflation has risen to 4%, the highest annual rate in three years. Today Marta Pacheco of EuroNews reported that the last of the vessels that left the Strait of Hormuz before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran have reached Europe. Analysts expect a new surge in energy prices. In Talking Points Memo today, David Kurtz points out that the economic mess in which the U.S., and the world, finds itself is entirely Trump’s fault. The trade wars, unjustified war in the Middle East, and attacks on U.S. science, universities, and immigration that are throttling economic growth are all a product of Trump’s personal choices.

As the war enters its seventh week, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said today that Senate Democrats will repeatedly force votes on war powers resolutions designed to force Trump to get congressional authorization before any further military action in Iran. “Forty-five days into this war, Congress has been sidelined because our Republican colleagues refuse to take a strong stand against this war and duck it completely because they’re afraid of Trump,” Schumer ​said today.

Thune and other Republicans countered with the belief that the war won’t go on much longer, and they support Trump’s actions.

Today former attorney general Pam Bondi was scheduled to testify under oath before the House Oversight and Reform Committee about the Department of Justice’s handling of the release of the Epstein files. The DOJ has released only about half of those files despite a law requiring it to produce them all no later than December 19 of last year. Many of the records it did release are heavily redacted, despite the very few and very specific conditions under which Congress allowed such redactions.

Bondi did not show up.

The Department of Justice is taking the position that since she was subpoenaed as attorney general and no longer holds that position, the subpoena was no longer in force.

Democrats on the committee disagree.

Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), who was a prosecutor before she entered the House, posted: “Pam Bondi refused to show up for today’s Oversight deposition—defying our lawful subpoena. We couldn’t care less that she was fired from her job as Attorney General. She is responsible for leading the White House cover-up of the Epstein files. Since she didn’t show up, Oversight Democrats will move to hold her in contempt of Congress. The survivors deserve justice—and we will get answers. Enough is enough.”

Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told the Weeknight: “People have to be held accountable for the laws that we pass in the Congress and the subpoenas that we put in place.”

Here’s the turnout at Univ of Georgia where the venue once was filled.

So the Slovinian Sex Worker Melania says she was unaware about Epstein’s sex trafficking and blackmail ..

…. and she just met Donald at a party while he was married to his second wife. My guesses:

She is Vlad Putin’s handler of Trump.

Of course she knew all about Epstein and Maxwell’s sex trafficking, blackmail, and of Epstein’s connections to Vladimir. She undoubtedly knew of Trump’s use of Epstein’s girls too after all she had been in the sex industry for at least 20+ years

Was Putin supplying her with Russian and Eastern European girls . . .  good chance boys, too.   She was passing the girls and boys on to Maxwell & Epstein because that got Putin Kompramat on rich and powerful men all over the place.

She is trying to get in front of some major dirt about herself, Epstein, and that one Italian dirt bag who had “a modeling agency” business.

All this ties into one of the largest criminal syndicates in the world . . .    Vlad is the Godfather and he has help from people like Musk and Thiel.

Disinformation, election rigging, bank fraud, blackmail, sex trafficking, rape, kidnapping, murder, beauty pageants and modeling shows that were just recruiting events to get more girls, CRYPTO, oligarchs, and the owning of politicians such as as the GOP in America, a Prime Minister of Norway, and lots of other countries too. Trump got real nervous when European Countries started looking @ Epstein connections.

Then, there’s Trump

Trump is a psychopath who has progressive dementia and other major medical medical issues such as some kind of congestive heart failure, he has had at least two strokes, and knows his time is short and wants to bring down American with him because his ego makes him think if I am not in this world then I don’t care what happens. He enjoys hurting people.

And don’t forget he is a convicted rapist too.