Trolling or actual issue?\u00a0<\/strong>For just $50, you can own<\/a> a “Trump 2028” hat, courtesy of the Trump Organization’s online store. “The future looks bright!” reads the product description. “Rewrite the rules with the Trump 2028 high crown hat.”<\/p>\n President Donald Trump (born in 1946, and getting up there in the years) being elected to a third term in 2028 would be a violation of the 22nd Amendment.<\/p>\n “A lot of people would like me to do that,” Trump told<\/a> NBC earlier this year. “But, I mean, I basically tell them, we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.” Steve Bannon has also planted seeds<\/a> along the same lines.<\/p>\n Franklin Delano Roosevelt had these aspirations too, prior to the 22nd Amendment’s passage<\/a> in 1951, yet his fourth term ended with his death in April 1945, just three months into it. Given that we’re\u00a0still\u00a0<\/em>recovering from FDR’s 12 years of government and executive power expansion, and given that it would be a huge violation of the Constitution, I don’t think Trump seeking another term would be appropriate at all. But is there harm in joking about it?<\/p>\n Team Trump loves both their trolling and retaining some plausible deniability via jokes. Putting a Trump hotel up in the Gaza Strip: joke or real idea for a peace process? Building five more Terrorism Confinement Centers (CECOT) and sending “homegrown” criminals off to Uncle Nayib Bukele in El Salvador: friendly chit-chat or legitimate concept? Third term hat: fashion statement or an idea they’re working to seed? Your mileage may vary, but I don’t love this joke, personally.<\/p>\n ACLU tries to get Venezuelan deportees back to U.S. soil:\u00a0<\/strong>Early today, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)\u2014an organization with great roots that has, in recent years, strayed awfully far from its mission\u2014filed a new version<\/a> of the lawsuit they brought against the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) on March 15. This lawsuit, instead of trying to make it so groups of Venezuelans cannot be deported under the AEA, seeks to bring back the roughly 140 Venezuelan nationals who were already deported to El Salvador last month under the act.<\/p>\n The ACLU won its earlier suit, with Judge James E. Boasberg rebuking the administration, ordering it to stop using the AEA to send planes of Venezuelans to El Salvador, and to turn around flights that were already in the air (an order the administration claimed it could not comply with). The Boasberg-Trump showdown is ongoing, but the new ACLU suit seeks to essentially undo the initial act by the Trump administration.<\/p>\n The New York Times\u00a0<\/em>describes<\/a> both the procedural question at play\u2014”whether the Trump administration has provided migrants whom officials have asserted are subject to removal under the law with sufficient time and opportunity to challenge their deportations in court”\u2014and the substantive one\u2014”whether the White House should be allowed to use the act at all against the Venezuelan migrants.” Does the in-migration of Venezuelans\u00a0actually\u00a0<\/em>constitute an invasion by a hostile nation? Because that’s what the AEA is meant to be used for, and this sure looks like a stretched use of that act.<\/p>\n Scenes from New York:\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Yesterday, the Department of Transportation (DOT) said it had axed several of the federal attorneys tasked with defending it in a lawsuit over New York City’s congestion pricing program, saying they harmed the DOT’s case.<\/p>\n “There is considerable litigation risk in defending [Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s] February 19, 2025 decision [to attempt to revoke congestion pricing authorization] against [the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s] claims…that the decision was contrary to law, pretextual, procedurally arbitrary and capricious, and violated due process,” wrote<\/a> three of the assistant U.S. Attorneys tasked with…defending Duffy’s case in a private memo that they accidentally filed in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday. “It is unlikely that Judge [Lewis] Liman or further courts of review will accept the argument that [congestion pricing] was not a statutorily authorized ‘value pricing’ pilot under [the relevant law],” the memo continues.<\/p>\n “The 11-page letter instead suggested that the department could build a stronger case if it sought to terminate the federal government’s approval of the tolling program ‘as a matter of changed agency priorities,’ rather than stick with the previous tactic of questioning the legality of the toll,” notes<\/a>\u00a0The New York Times.<\/em><\/p>\n
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