Senators have faced plenty of controversial judicial nominations in recent memory, but Emil Bove — a former criminal defense lawyer for Donald Trump, whom the president tapped for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals — is arguably the most controversial of them all.

Given the degree to which Bove’s nomination has been mired in scandalthere was some hope that at least one Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee might agree that it’d be a mistake to give Trump’s former lawyer a lifetime position on the federal appellate bench.

That didn’t happen. NBC News reported:

Shortly before the vote, the panel’s Democratic members walked out of the hearing room in protestwith Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey describing the process as “insane.”

In fact, after the committee’s Republicans voted in support of Bove, members of the Democratic minority, led by Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, suggested the issue of whether Bove was actually reported out was still an open question and may be referred to the Senate parliamentarian because, as Democrats argued, Republicans broke procedural rules.

Stepping back, when the president first announced Bove’s nomination in May, he claimed his former defense attorney is “respected by everyone.”

All things considered, “everyone” was a poor choice of words.

When Bove worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, for example, he earned a reputation as an unprofessional and abusive prosecutor. He parlayed this background into a role as a Trump defense attorney, punctuated by his defeat in the Stormy Daniels case, which paid dividends: Trump rewarded Bove with a powerful position in the Justice Department, where he fired federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases and helped oversee the scandalous dismissal of New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case.

Just as importantly, if not more so, Erez Reuveni, a 15-year veteran Justice Department prosecutor, recently came forward as a whistleblower to tell senators that Bove repeatedly endorsed ignoring court orders and deliberately misleading judges. In a case involving the Alien Enemies Act and the administration’s alleged violation of a court order regarding deportation flights, Reuveni also described a meeting during which Bove “stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such court order.”

The nominee denied the whistleblower’s allegations, but internal documents released by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats appeared to bolster Reuveni’s allegations.

In case this weren’t quite enough, in his post-hearing written Senate questionnaireBove declined to rule out the possibility of the president running for a third term — despite the plain language of the U.S. Constitution — and did not denounce the insurrectionist Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Given all of this, opposition to Bove’s judicial nomination from outside Capitol Hill was overwhelming and unprecedented: Several dozen former judges and more than 900 former Justice Department lawyers pleaded with the Senate to oppose the nominee.

Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voted for him anyway.

Bove’s nomination now advances to the Senate floor for confirmation. To defeat him, four GOP senators would have to break ranks with the party, which seems unlikely. Watch this space.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Steve legs

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

Crime rates improved dramatically during Joe Biden’s presidency, and preliminary data suggests the news continues to look encouraging as Donald Trump’s second term gets underway. Common sense might suggest that the White House would be eager to celebrate the developments, touting improved public safety.

But that’s not quite what the public is hearing from the president’s team.

During one of his Fox News appearances this week, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller spoke generally about the administration’s efforts to arrest immigrants, before making a specific claim about a specific city:

The comments did not go unnoticed, especially among people in Minneapolis who enjoy visiting local parks. (If Miller is looking for a better example of people steering clear of public parks, I might refer him to MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where local residents were recently forced to flee when federal officers and National Guard troops arrived for reasons that are still unclear.)

What’s more, plenty of observers were quick to note that crime rates across Minnesota have improved considerably in recent years, and Minneapolis, in particular, has seen a significant decrease in violent crime in the first half of 2025.

But perhaps the most pointed response to Miller came from Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who said in a statement released by her office, “If we wanted a white supremacist’s opinion, we’d ask. But we don’t. So we won’t.”

Moriarty added for good measure, “Also, Minneapolis is great.”

To be sure, that’s a memorable reaction, but there’s still the larger context to consider. Amid genuinely terrific news on crime rates in cities across the country, Trump administration officials aren’t just failing to brag, they’re pretending that public safety is getting worse, reality be damned.

Consider this exchange between Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York.

There’s no great mystery here: The Trump administration wants people to be afraid, because the more Americans are scared, the more they’re likely to endorse a mass-deportation campaign.

For the White House, in other words, the politics of fear is overriding every other consideration, including the temptation to brag about — and perhaps even try to take credit for — a heartening national trend.

Steve legs

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

A Trump-appointed federal judge has blocked a rule the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued just before Joe Biden left the White House that would have banned medical debt from Americans’ credit reports.

The ruling is a terrible blow to consumers.

CNN reports that “Judge Sean Jordan of the US District Court of Texas’ Eastern District found that the rule exceeded the bureau’s authority under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, agreeing with the arguments of two industry associations, which had filed a lawsuit against the rule that was later joined by the Trump administration.”

The ruling is a terrible blow to consumers, and it pushes the country back toward a preposterous norm of punishing Americans financially for their health issues.

Thanks to our dysfunctional and immoral U.S. health care system, tens of millions of Americans owe medical debt. And on top of having to pay off that debt, an additional indignity for debtors is seeing their credit scores take a hit. That means people of limited financial means who have incurred medical debt are not only paying off onerous medical bills, but then also facing penalties around eligibility and interest rates when they try to do things like open up new credit cards, secure mortgages or get approved to rent apartments.

As I wrote this year when the rule was announced:

The CFPB estimated that the nixed rule would’ve wiped out $50 billion in medical bills from the credit reports of about 15 million Americans. The bureau calculated that would’ve raised credit scores for affected people by 20 points on average, leading to “the approval of approximately 22,000 additional, affordable mortgages every year.” Past CFPB research has also found that medical debt is a “poor predictor” of whether someone will pay back a loan.

That the Trump administration joined the lawsuit against the rule — while effectively shutting down the CFPB — speaks to the priorities of right-wing populism. “The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” the president declared after his first election victory. But that same president and his GOP allies in Congress cut Medicaid and food stamps and allied with business lobbies against millions of Americans facing crushing medical debt. It’s clear, yet again, whose side Trump is on.

Zeeshan aleem

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.