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The Dictatorship

JD Vance throws down an extremely high-risk gauntlet for America’s judges

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JD Vance throws down an extremely high-risk gauntlet for America’s judges

The term “constitutional crisis” gets overused. But Vice President JD Vance seems to be inviting one.

On Sunday, the vice president’s comments on social media raised alarm bells across the legal profession. Apparently in response to multiple judges temporarily halting some of President Donald Trump’s executive actionsVance posted: “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Wrong. Wrong. And wrong.

Judges are allowed to check the executive branch when it exceeds its authority. In fact, that’s exactly what they are supposed to do.

Courts have ruled against illegal military actions, such as striking down military commissions at Guantanamo Bay after 9/11. Courts have also ruled a prosecutor violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment when engaging in selective prosecution. And, in the same way, courts serve as a check on presidents when they exceed their power. The Supreme Court famously struck down President Harry S. Truman’s efforts to seize steel mills during the Korean War on the grounds that his conduct conflicted with the Labor Management Relations Act.

Judges are allowed to check the executive branch when it exceeds its authority. In fact, that’s exactly what they are supposed to do.

Vance’s statement contradicts more than 200 years of Supreme Court precedent. Every first-year law student reads the case of Marbury v. Madisonthe 1803 decision that confirmed the power of the courts to conduct judicial review. In our system of three co-equal branches of government, the role of the courts is to interpret the law. Courts strike down statutes passed by legislatures when they violate the Constitution. Courts also declare executive action illegal when it violates the law.

To date, judges have ruled against a number of Trump’s executive orders, at least temporarily, based on findings that plaintiffs have shown a substantial likelihood to succeed on the merits. The lawsuits include challenges to Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenshipimpound appropriated funds, shutter USAID, slash the federal workforce and permit Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to access Treasury Department payment systems. Courts have entered temporary restraining orders to preserve the status quo while the cases work their way through the legal system.

As a graduate of Yale Law School, Vance certainly knows that courts have the power to strike down executive actions that exceed legal limits. But he seems to be planting seeds to undermine public confidence in the courts.

And he is not alone. Posts popped up in an online chorus rebuking the courts that ruled against Trump. Vance quoted another post from conservative Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, who wrote, “Judicial interference with legitimate acts of state, especially the internal functioning of a co-equal branch, is a violation of the separation of powers.”

Both Vance and Vermeule used the word “legitimate” to describe the president’s use of executive power, suggesting that it is the courts that are overstepping their boundaries. While people are free to criticize judges and to appeal their decisions, these attacks imply an abuse of power rather than a difference of opinion.

Musk joined in on the attack, Postg a baseless accusation against the judge who ruled against the DOGE. “A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!” In his post, Musk quoted another X user who referred to the judge as “unelected” and lacking a “mandate by the people.” Of course, under our Constitution all federal judges are unelected and are instead appointed by the president for life, for the very reason that they will be insulated from politics.

Whatever electoral mandate Trump enjoys does not give him license to violate the law.

Whatever electoral mandate Trump enjoys does not give him license to violate the law. He certainly has the authority to implement his policy agenda, but he must do so in a way that conforms to the federal statutes and the Constitution. Many of his executive orders seem to deliberately defy the law, perhaps in an effort to invite lawsuits that in turn push the limits of his power. Perhaps he hopes that ultimately a friendly Supreme Court will agree to expand the authority of the executive.

In 2021, while campaigning for the Senate in Ohio, Vance said he would “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Advocating for replacing federal employees with political loyalists is troubling enough, but Vance went on to advocate for defying court orders as well: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did,and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” The Jackson quote, which may be a myth, relates to a Supreme Court decision that the Cherokees were an independent nation and entitled to live on their land. It makes the point that courts, unlike the executive branch, have no armies or police officers to carry out their rulings. Instead, they depend on the willingness of the other branches of government to obey their decisions.

The defiance of a court order by the executive branch would indeed be a constitutional crisis. Eventually, the only realistic remedy in that situation would be impeachment, and in recent history, we have seen that members of a president’s own party have been reluctant to vote against him. And if the legislative branch failed to come to the rescue of the courts, then the executive branch would become something the framers of our Constitution would find unrecognizable.

We would have not just a constitutional crisis but a constitutional tragedy.

Barbara McQuade

Barbara McQuade is an BLN columnist and NBC News and BLN legal analyst. She is the author of “Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America,”as well as a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

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The Dictatorship

Trump administration to send ‘hundreds more’ federal agents to Minneapolis

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Trump administration to send ‘hundreds more’ federal agents to Minneapolis

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday that “hundreds more” federal officers are being sent to Minneapolis following the killing of a 37-year-old Minnesota woman by an ICE agent last week.

Noem told Fox News that the surge of federal forces are being sent “in order to allow our ICE and Border Patrol individuals working in Minneapolis to do so safely.”

The additional officers are expected to arrive on Sunday and Monday, Noem said.

The surge was announced after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis on Wednesday in an incident that has drawn large protests against the Trump administration’s widespread deployment of federal agents and National Guard troops to major U.S. cities. The demonstrations continued through the weekend as thousands of people protested in Minneapolis and other cities across the country.

Local and state officials, including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, D, and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob FreyD, were outraged by the killing and have doubled down on demands for immigration officials to leave the city, arguing they are making the area less safe.

At a news conference after Good’s killing, Frey told immigration officials to “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis” and vowed to get justice.

Frey told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday: “I don’t want our police officers spending time working with ICE on immigration enforcement… You know what I want our police officers doing? I want them stopping murders from happening. I want them preventing car-jackings.”

Cellphone video said to have been taken by Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who fatally shot Good, was released Friday. The new video does not clearly demonstrate that Good was attempting to hit Ross with her car, as Trump officials have claimed.

Earlier bystander footage shows the wheels turned to the right as Good’s car pulls forward, away from Ross, who then shoots Good through the car’s windshield.

Noem and other Trump administration officials have called Good a “domestic terrorist,” and repeatedly claimed that she had tried to “run over” immigration officers.

Minnesota saw a massive 30-day surge of federal agents beginning earlier this month, with roughly 1,000 additional officers deployed to Minneapolis and St. Paul, including from ICE, the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Minneapolis is one of many cities targeted by the administration in a nationwide crackdown on crime and immigration. Since President Donald Trump took office for a second term last year, immigration agencies and National Guard troops have been sent to cities including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Charlotte, N.C., and Memphis.

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.

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National Portrait Gallery changes Trump portrait, removes text about Jan. 6

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National Portrait Gallery changes Trump portrait, removes text about Jan. 6

The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., has swapped out a portrait of President Donald Trump and removed text about his two impeachments and the Jan.6 insurrection at the Capitol.

The White House announced the news on Saturday, sharing a photo of the black-and-white portrait of the president in the Oval Office with his fists on the desk taken by White House photographer Daniel Torok.

The previous phototaken by Washington Post photojournalist Matt McClain, showed Trump in a red tie with text on a nearby wall that read, in part: “Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials.

A spokesperson for the Smithsonian told MS NOW that it is “beginning its planned update of the America’s Presidents gallery which will undergo a larger refresh this Spring” and that “the history of Presidential impeachments continues to be represented in our museums, including the National Museum of American History.”

A White House spokesperson said that “for the first time in history, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery has hung up an iconic photo taken by the White House honoring President Trump. His unmatched aura will be seen and felt throughout the halls of the National Portrait Gallery.”

The Colorado legislature agreed last year to remove a portrait of Trump from the state Capitol after he called the painting “the worst.” He also said his photo on the cover of Time magazine in 2025 was taken from an unflattering angel, calling it the “Worst of All Time.”

Last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, said that a federal law requiring Congress to hang a plaque in the Capitol honoring law enforcment officers who helped protect the Capitol on Jan. 6, was “not implementable.” But senators quickly passed a resolution to “prominently display” the plaque in the Senate wing of the building.

Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.

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The Dictatorship

Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead’s music will endure for generations

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Bob Weir, rhythm guitarist, co-lead vocalist and one of the primary songwriters for the Grateful Dead, died Saturday at the age of 78. His passing leaves only two surviving founding members of the band, drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, both of whom performed with Weir as part of what is likely the last “official” Dead offshoot band, Dead and Company.

Often seen as the little brother figure to the larger-than-life Dead co-founder Jerry Garcia, Weir was the subject of a documentary appropriately titled, “The Other One” — which was also the name of a Dead song known for its particularly freaky jams when played live.

The mystery and the adventure and the promise of the new — even now, that’s the draw of a Dead show.

Weir, who was only 16 when he first started playing with Garcia, was known for rocking his signature short jean shorts on stage, and for being the relative sex symbol among a comparatively motley-looking group of hairy hippies. Among the band’s best-loved songs, Weir had a primary hand in tunes like “Sugar Magnolia,” “Cassidy,” “Jack Straw,” Estimated Prophet,” and “The Music Never Stopped.”

Never heard of any of those? You’re not alone. That’s one of the most curious (and to the band’s critics, infuriating) things about the Dead: They’re a titan of classic rock-and-roll, and basically had no hits.

The Grateful Dead’s one hit single, “Touch of Grey,” reached No. 9 on the Billboard charts in 1987. They had only a handful of radio-friendly studio tracks, and yet they’re one of the most enduring, iconic and highest-grossing live acts of all time. And they still draw, as evidenced by eight years of stadium tours by Dead and Company, followed by several residencies at the Sphere in Las Vegas and a run of shows in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park last summer to commemorate the Dead’s 60th anniversary. Even Dead cover bands, like Joe Russo’s Almost Dead (JRAD) and Dark Star Orchestra, regularly fill huge venues like Red Rocks.

Despite its unconventional path to superstardom, of any rock band born in the 1960s — with the exception of the Beatles — I’d argue the Grateful Dead’s music stands the best chance of enduring among future generations.

As “kids these days” stop buying guitars as a right of passage, and as rock-and-roll continues its terminal descent from being the dominant genre of popular music, there are a number of reasons for why young people continue to gravitate toward the Dead. Among them is the fact that although the band stopped releasing original music decades ago, the ways the songbook is performed have continued to evolve radically over the years, in keeping with the Dead’s spirit of improvisation, collaboration and generosity toward young musicians.

The Grateful Dead’s first gig (billed as the Warlocks) took place in a Northern California pizza parlour in May 1965. For the next three decades they would play thousands of shows — including Woodstock and its evil twin, Altamont. They would evolve from their early bluegrass and blues-heavy sound into something more psychedelic, heavy on jams — many of them a gormless mess, but still more of them capturing an ecstatic and transcendent musical kaleidoscope.

They’d incorporate jazz, funk, even disco into their sound (again, with various degrees of success, but never inhibited by a fear of failure). But they were always a dance band. People came to Dead shows to dance. And they still do.

When Garcia, the group’s de facto leader, died of a heart attack in a rehabilitation center in August 1995, the Grateful Dead never performed under that name again. But there were many Dead side projects, mostly led by Weir or bassist Phil Lesh, who died in 2024.

They were always a dance band. People came to Dead shows to dance. And they still do.

Deadheads are fond of touting the fact that no two Dead shows are the same — setlists are never duplicated — and it’s rare for the band to play the same song twice during a particular run of shows. To that end, no two Dead side-project bands are the same, either. Whether under names like Furthur, Rat Dog, Wolf Bros, etc., Weir’s bands typically played at a slower tempo, while Lesh’s virtuoso “Phil and Friends” pickup bands changed so often that the audience not only didn’t know what songs would be played, they didn’t even know what style the band would play in.

The mystery and the adventure and the promise of the new — even now, that’s the draw of a Dead show. And the Dead not only continues to bring in younger fans, grumpy Gen Xers like myself — who formerly made a show of their disdain for the hippies like the Dead — have come around in recent years as “mid-life Deadheads,” a phenomenon I wrote about in 2023.

The music writer Steven Hyden noted in his book, “Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the Center of Classic Rock,” that Weir and Lesh, in particular, took “a lead role in handpicking the people who will carry their music forward once they’re gone.” I was one of the delighted — and stunned — audience members who saw Weir join Joe Russo’s Almost Dead on stage for their 10th anniversary show at Brooklyn Bowl in 2023, and I was also in the audience for Lesh’s last New York area show at the Capital Theater in 2024, when he performed his entire final encore with JRAD as his backing band.

Next weekend, JRAD is coming back to the Cap for a run of sold-out shows, and I’ll be there with a few thousand friends, laughing and dancing and maybe crying a little bit, but all in joyful remembrance of Bobby — listening to the music evolve some more.

Weir, who was reportedly diagnosed with cancer in July, leaves behind his wife Natascha and daughters, Monet and Chloe.

It’s the Dead’s anarchic spirit of freedom that places no limits on what the music could become. And it’s the generosity and humility of guys like Bobby Weir who gave the gift of the Dead to generations he’ll never get to see.

Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW.

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