TV News LIES

Michigan is not obligated to hand over sensitive voter data to the Trump administration, a federal appeals court decided on Wednesday.

A divided three-judge panel for the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Title III of the 1960 Civil Rights Act does not authorize the Justice Department to compel the state to provide its unredacted voter roll, which contains the dates of birth, partial social security numbers and driver’s license numbers of every registered voter in the state.

Judge Andre Mathis, a Biden appointee, authored the majority opinion. He was joined by Senior Judge R. Guy Cole Jr., a Clinton appointee.

Judge John Nalbandian, who was nominated by President Trump in his first term, dissented.

The Justice Department has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia in an attempt to force compliance with its demand, but those efforts have been repeatedly rejected at the district court level. Its cases against California, Oregon, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine and Maryland have also been dismissed.

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A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Donald Trump's administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote.

The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston effectively converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago, in which she temporarily blocked many of Trump's efforts to overhaul elections, into a permanent ban.

Casper rejected the administration's argument that the lawsuit to block the changes brought by Democratic state attorneys general was premature because the rules had yet to be implemented. Instead, she agreed that the Constitution gives states and Congress the authority to regulate elections, and that Trump's requirements violated the separation of powers.

The Constitution "does not grant the President any specific powers over elections," she wrote.

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President Donald Trump abruptly canceled a signing ceremony for landmark housing affordability legislation Wednesday, saying he wanted Republicans in Congress to pass a major election reform bill first.

A couple hours later, Trump arrived at Capital Hill for a previously scheduled lunch with Republican senators.

Addressing whether the SAVE America Act, a bill that affects voter registration laws, is more important than the housing bill, he said: “Every election is important. They want a lot of communists to come in.”

The housing bill, which passed the Senate and House of Representatives by large, bipartisan margins this week, was a significant – and rare – victory on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers and experts called it a sweeping "first step" in tackling the nation's housing crunch.

If Congress remains in session, the housing bill can become law without the president's signature 10 days after it was presented to him.

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By the time Maria Ruhtenberg was fired from her job last September for posting about Charlie Kirk's assassination, few people even knew what she had written.

The posts and comments she had made on Facebook were only visible to her friends. Just one person, a Facebook friend she barely knew, complained to her employer. "I don't even know how we became Facebook friends, honestly," said Ruhtenberg.

After the conservative activist was shot, Ruhtenberg wrote things like "live by the sword, die by the sword" and "you reap what you sow" and that she disagreed with Kirk's views about the Second Amendment. Ruhtenberg also said that "whoever shot [Kirk] should go to prison."

Two days after that complaint, a right-wing outlet in Iowa emailed Ruhtenberg's employer to ask for a comment about her posts. The next day, she was terminated, less than five days after her initial post. Ruhtenberg had spent 15 years as a public defender for the state of Iowa.

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Several staff members have reportedly been fired from the US office of the director of national intelligence (DNI), multiple outlets have reported. These firings come less than a week after Donald Trump appointed Bill Pulte as the acting director after former director Tulsi Gabbard announced she was leaving the post in late May.

CBS reported on Tuesday that more than 50 career and political staff members had been dismissed, with six individuals fired and 45 “sent back to their home agencies”.

The DNI has not responded to the Guardian’s request for comment on the reported firings.

CNN first reported that Pulte, who also leads the federal housing finance agency, was considering the dismissal of hundreds of staff members on 19 June on the same day he assumed the role of acting director.

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A federal ⁠judge in California vacated the ⁠Trump administration’s ​nationwide policies expanding arrests at immigration courthouses and the duration for detaining noncitizens in short-term facilities, finding the actions of US Immigration ⁠and Customs Enforcement and another government arm “arbitrary and capricious”.

US district judge P Casey Pitts of the northern district of California on Tuesday vacated ICE’s ⁠policies that had rescinded previous strictures on arrests at immigration courthouses and allowed detainees to ​be held in short-term cells for up ‌to 72 hours. He ‌did the same for a similar policy undertaken by the US Department of Justice’s ‌executive office for immigration review that removed limits on courthouse arrests.

The 71-page ruling, issued in a case brought by an asylum seeker arrested upon departing a routine hearing at a San Francisco immigration court, struck down key parts of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement policies. Judge Pitts, appointed by Joe Biden, in effect reinstated Biden-era policies ‌that limited arrests at immigration courthouses to narrow circumstances and capped detentions in short-term facilities to 12 hours.

SinceDonald Trump retook office ​in January of last year, his administration has ramped up arrests of immigrants suspected of being in the US illegally as part of an aggressive deportation push.

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