Thursday, May 01st
Last update08:16:57 AM GMT
Political Glance
A divided federal appeals court panel on Friday temporarily halted U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s contempt proceedings against the Trump administration over its deportation flights to El Salvador last month.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit indicated its order is intended to provide “sufficient opportunity” for the court to consider the government’s appeal and “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion.”
The acting commissioner of the IRS was fired Friday after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly complained to President Donald Trump that DOGE cost-cutter in chief Elon Musk did not ask for approval to name Gary Shapley as the agency’s leader.
Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Michael Faulkender is expected to take Shapley’s place. Shapley, a longtime IRS agent, was nominated Tuesday after former interim leader Melanie Krause resigned because the IRS was required to disclose taxpayer information to immigration officials
The interim commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service was ousted Friday after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly complained to President Donald Trump that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, had instituted the new leader without his knowledge, five unnamed people told the New York Times.
Although the tax-collection agency reports to Bessent, the Treasury secretary felt that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had gone behind his back to put Gary Shapley in power as acting head of the IRS. While DOGE pushed Shapley’s nomination through the White House, Bessent was not consulted for his approval, the people said.
The Supreme Court on Thursday said it would weigh in on the Trump administration's request that it be allowed to broadly enforce its new restrictions on birthright citizenship while the policy is being litigated.
The court said it will hear oral arguments on May 15.
It's the first challenge to the new administration's policies that the justices have taken up for public discussion.
“I am so happy," President Donald Trump said Thursday. "I think the case has been so misunderstood.”The administration had asked the court to scale back the nationwide actions that judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington issued to pause Trump's order limiting birthright citizenship.
Lisa Anderson, a doctor based in Connecticut, said she received the troubling email from the DHS on Friday, NBC Connecticut first reported.
“It is time for you to leave the United States,” the email said.
Anderson, who was born in Pennsylvania, said she has “no idea” how she ended up on the department’s radar.
“The language seemed pretty threatening to whomever it might actually apply to,” Anderson told NBC Connecticut.
More than five months after the 2024 election, a swath of voters in North Carolina are still unsure whether their votes will count in an unprecedented effort to overturn a valid US election.
Democrat Allison Riggs defeated Republican Jefferson Griffin in a contest for the state supreme court. But after the election, Griffin challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of voters. A ruling from the North Carolina supreme court on Friday paved the way for as many as 1,675 voters to have their ballots thrown out in the election – more than double Riggs’s margin of victory.
The challenged voters include someone who grew up in the state, a professor who was there for two decades, a lifelong resident studying abroad, and someone who still owns a home there and plans to move back, according to Guardian interviews.
In a scorching ruling, a U.S. federal judge found probable cause to hold President Donald Trump's administration in contempt for "deliberately and gleefully" violating his order last month halting flights of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under a wartime law.
Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg's April 16 order is the latest escalation in the Trump administration's standoff with the courts over its deportations of migrants to a prison in El Salvador. Some legal experts worry the courts and Trump administration are careening toward a Constitutional crisis over the case.
The president and his allies have suggested Boasberg be impeached, and cited national security concerns in refusing to provide details to the judge, who noted those same officials published detailed social media videos of the detainees arriving in El Salvador.
Faculty members from US universities – including public ones which do not receive endowments – are banding together in attempts to resist the Donald Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedoms.
The resolution comes as a result of “recent and escalating politically motivated actions by governmental bodies [which] pose a significant threat to the foundational principles of American higher education including the autonomy of university governance, the integrity of scientific research, and the protection of free speech”.
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