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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Green-eyed monsters [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-24
We begin today with Rex Huppke of USA Today writing about the tacky shoe salesman’s latest bout with Obama Derangement Syndrome.
Whenever Trump’s back is against the wall, you can count on him reverting to beloved MAGA conspiracies about Barack Obama. The popular former president lives rent-free in Trump’s predominantly vacant mind, and Trump’s jealousy of Obama has always been palpable. With good reason. Obama left office with a 59% approval rating, according to Gallup. At the end of Trump’s first term, his approval rating was a weak 34%. [...] Rather than releasing the Epstein files – as 89% of Americans want the government to do, according to a recent CBS News poll – Trump had Gabbard release declassified intelligence documents relating to investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election that Trump won. Gabbard trumpeted the documents as revealing a “treasonous conspiracy in 2016” by Obama and others that was “essentially a years-long coup.” [...] Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said July 23: “When you have nothing to present that's affirmative to the American people, Republicans blame Barack Obama. It's laughable.” He’s right. Trump has acute Obama Derangement Syndrome and will always exist as a low-brow carnival barker yapping nonsensically in Obama’s shadow.
Justin Papp of Roll Call reminds us that a vote to release the “Epstein Files” isn’t the only that will wait until after the August recess.
Six months after he first announced the plan, Speaker Mike Johnson said leaders were aiming to make it a reality after August recess, creating a new select subcommittee to dig once more into the Capitol attack. “House Republicans are proud of our work so far in exposing the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee during the 117th Congress, but there is clearly more work to be done,” Johnson said in a statement Wednesday. Before the new body can get off the ground, the House must vote on a resolution to create it, which Johnson said was introduced Wednesday. The select subcommittee would be led by Rep. Barry Loudermilk and housed under the House Judiciary Committee. It would pick up on the work started by the Georgia Republican last Congress, scrutinizing the findings of the Democrat-led select committee convened in the months immediately after the attack.
Jennifer Rubin of The Contrarian has a few words about political “distractions.”
Jeffrey Epstein is a distraction from Dear Leader’s magnificent tax cuts (for the rich, of course), the White House insists. Evidence that Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity was not in fact “obliterated” is a distraction from his glorious military achievement, Trump whines. Signalgate, migrants’ deaths in detention, Trump’s health and mental decline, grotesque ethical lapses at the Justice Department—anything, really—is a distraction from celebrating the mythology of Trump.[...] Unfortunately, short-sighted Democrats also fall into the “distraction” trap when they underestimate the potency of certain behavior (e.g., Trump’s lawless, abusive ICE raids). Too often, nervous Democrats urge the public to ignore one set of Trump abuses to focus on more “popular” issues. The naysayers too frequently assume that Trump has a permanent advantage on matters like border security or deploying military force in the Middle East, or that the public is fundamentally uninterested in topics like corruption or mistreatment of immigrants. [...] Certainly, in an era of information overload, Democrats would be wise to prioritize essential matters like healthcare or economic well-being, but that is a far cry from denigrating legitimate issues that reflect the fundamental dishonesty, inhumanity, lawlessness, and incompetence of Trump and his minions. A few rules of thumb might be in order before writing off concerns as being mere “distractions.” An issue is not a “distraction” simply because victims or the causes they espouse are disfavored by large swaths of red America (e.g., Palestinian students, government workers, trans kids) or because they can be categorized as “elites” (e.g., university professors, Stephen Colbert, law firms, Sen. Alex Padilla). An issue that seems to be a sui generis distraction (e.g., ABC’s settlement with Trump) has the power to set the pattern for a new line of attacks against democracy, such as defunding universities or blacklisting law firms. And something is not a “distraction” simply because Republicans claim (falsely) that a MAGA malefactor is an outlier (see: Sen. Mike Lee on the assassinations in Minnesota or Rep. Andy Ogles’ call to denaturalize and deport Zohran Mamdani).
Nadra Nittle of The 19th News notes that the first state to allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition has now banned the practice.
Two decades ago, Texas made history as the first state to grant in-state tuition to undocumented students. Now, it has taken that opportunity away — upending thousands of young lives and, advocates warn, potentially influencing other states to restrict higher education access for immigrants. The U.S. Justice Department filed a complaint against Texas in June seeking to prevent the continued implementation of a 2001 policy that has allowed tens of thousands of undocumented students to pay the same for college as Texans with legal status. Rather than defend the Texas Dream Act in court, the state’s Attorney General, Ken Paxton, agreed to a “consent judgment” with President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice within six hours of the complaint’s filing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas. On Tuesday, legal experts, educators and undocumented students warned of the far-reaching consequences of rollbacks to in-state tuition policies in Texas and other states during a call hosted by United We Dream, an immigrant youth-led organization. With the Center for Migration Studies finding that undocumented women are more represented on college campuses than their male counterparts, rescinding in-state tuition is of particular concern to women.
Kyle Davidson of Michigan Advance reports that The U.S. Department of Education has opened investigations into two Michigan schools (along with 3 schools in other states)
The University of Michigan and Western Michigan University are both subject to an investigation the department says will determine whether they are providing scholarships only for students with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival status, or who are undocumented following complaints submitted to the department’s Office of Civil Rights by the Legal Insurrection Foundation, a conservative advocacy group. According to a statement from the department, the University of Michigan’s Dreamer Scholarship, which “is intended to support undocumented students or students with DACA status”, will be looked into, as well as Western Michigan University’s WMU Undocumented/DACA Scholarship “for undergraduate students who are ineligible to receive federal student aid due to an undocumented or DACA status.” The complaints argue these scholarships “provide unlawful exclusionary funding based on national origin.” [...] This latest action comes amid efforts by President Donald Trump and his administration to dramatically redefine the federal government’s role in education. His administration has pushed for sweeping changes, including an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to oversee the shutdown of her own department, deep staffing cuts affecting over 1,300 agency employees, threats to withhold funding from schools that implement diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and an aggressive campaign against so-called “woke” policies in higher education.
Nick Robins-Early and Lauren Gambino of the Guardian describe Trumps latest executive orders about artificial intelligence .
Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a trio of executive orders that he vowed would turn the United States into an “AI export powerhouse”, including one targeting what the White House described as “woke” artificial intelligence models. [...] The new order requires any artificial intelligence company receiving federal funding to maintain politically neutral AI models free of “ideological dogmas such as DEI” – putting pressure on an industry increasingly seeking to partner with government agencies. It is part of the Trump administration’sbroader anti-diversity campaign that has also targeted federal agencies, academic institutions and the military. While the directive emphasizes that the federal government “should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace”, it asserts that public procurement carries “the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas”. The metrics of what make an AI model politically biased are contentious and open to interpretation, however, and therefore may allow the administration to use the order to target companies at its discretion.
Finally today, Mattathias Schwartz of The New York Times reports on the Ninth Circuit’s block of Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship.
In a 48-page opinion, two of the three judges on the panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that Mr. Trump’s executive order “contradicts the plain language of the 14th Amendment’s grant of citizenship to ‘all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’” They rejected the Justice Department’s argument that the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” meant that the longstanding constitutional guarantee to birthright citizenship could be redefined to exclude babies born to undocumented immigrants, as well as babies born to mothers who are in the country legally but temporarily, such as tourists, university students or temporary workers, if the father is a noncitizen. The ruling appears to be the first time that an appellate court has ruled on birthright citizenship after a Supreme Court decisionlimiting the scope of injunctions sent lawyers scrambling to recast their claims in light of its new standard.
Everyone have the best possible day that you can!
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