Democrats Scramble to Strip Away Trump’s Warmongering Powers

Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, requested Tuesday that the Department of Justice scale back the president’s power to use the U.S. military domestically.

In a letter on behalf of the committee Democrats, Durbin urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to “withdraw certain legal opinions by The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) relating to the allocation of war powers and foreign relations powers between Congress and the president.

“I request that the Department of Justice publicly release opinions and manuals pertaining to the domestic use of the U.S. military,” Durbin wrote. “For decades, OLC has issued guidance on the circumstances in which the President may deploy the military within the United States, as well as what servicemembers may do when so deployed.

“The American people have a right to know how the Executive Branch interprets the President’s constitutional and statutory authority to use the military domestically,” Durbin continued. “The need for transparency regarding these legal interpretations is particularly urgent today given the risk of domestic military deployment to suppress protests or carry out mass deportations.”

In a post on X, the committee Democrats alleged that there were five “flawed opinions” that had “run afoul of Congress’s critical check on presidential war powers” that needed to be rescinded.

It seems that Durbin and Senate Democrats are hoping to rein in Trump’s military powers ahead of his return to the White House later this month. Trump has previously claimed he will use the military to conduct sweeping raids as part of his mass deportation scheme. He has also threatened to turn the U.S. military against his political enemies and even foreign allies.

During a rambling press conference Tuesday, Donald Trump threatened that “all hell will break out” if hostages held by Hamas in Gaza aren’t released by his inauguration on January 20.

It’s a threat Trump has repeatedly made since early December, and he did not elaborate on what it means Tuesday, instead saying, “It will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone.” Last month, he promised “hell to pay” if the hostages weren’t released by his inauguration, seemingly threatening U.S. military action but making no mention of a Gaza ceasefire as a prerequisite.

If the “hell” Trump is promising is military action, it would inflame the Middle East further and likely set off a regional conflict that already includes Iran, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. In a phone call last month, Trump spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an accused war criminal, and reiterated the threat.

Throughout his presidential campaign, Trump has remarked that Israel should “finish the job” in Gaza, basically endorsing the country’s yearlong brutal military assault that has resulted in a humanitarian crisis and war crimes charges. What would further “hell” visited upon Gaza look like to a territory that has been reduced to rubble and tens of thousands of deaths?

The civilian death toll in Gaza has only continued to climb since then, with thousands of bodies trapped under rubble and indirect deaths caused by the destruction of infrastructure, including hospitals and food distribution systems. In October, 99 health workers who worked in Gaza sent President Biden a letter saying that they had “witnessed crimes beyond comprehension,” urging a U.S. arms embargo on Israel.

President Biden will leave office refusing to consider any action against Israel, instead planning an $8 billion arms sale to the country on his way out. Trump’s latest words confirm that his Israel-Palestine policy won’t be any better and in fact might exacerbate the ongoing genocide even further.

Los Angeles authorities have evacuated some 30,000 people as of Wednesday, as flames tear through the Pacific Palisades, threatening more than 10,000 homes. And even though the fires are literally in its own backyard, Los Angeles hasn’t exactly prioritized its ability to respond to the fiery devastation.

The city’s 2024–2025 budget slashed about $17.6 million from the fire department, while increasing the budget for the city’s police force by $126 million, according to figures from the Los Angeles City Administrative Office.

Exactly why the fire department was deprioritized amid escalating wildfire seasons is unclear, but the unfortunate budget decision comes at a time when state firefighting reserves are also facing the heat. Depending on the year, low-wage incarcerated inmates compose somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection—but their ranks within the reserve have been drained by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Los Angeles Times.

“We’re here today to lay out a path forward for Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said of the proposed budget in April. “This budget continues our momentum toward change by prioritizing core city services, but using this as an opportunity as a reset, so that our budgets moving forward are more honest, transparent and more focused.”

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders tossed some blame for the ongoing crisis at climate change deniers in Congress, slamming the country’s continued inaction on the “existential” threat.

“The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is,” Sanders wrote on X Wednesday.

But the incoming government is less than likely to prioritize green initiatives. Trump’s transition team has already prepared executive orders for the president-elect to once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international climate treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, Trump reportedly resisted sending wildfire aid to California in 2018 because the state voted Democratic.

Republicans have also proposed nixing the nation’s clean energy programs, including dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in order to save some $700 billion from the federal deficit so that they can barely dampen the blow of extending Trump’s 2017 tax plan to the benefit of corporations. Nonpartisan budget groups predict that such a move could balloon the deficit anywhere between $5 trillion and $15 trillion.

Killing President Joe Biden’s key legislative victory, however, would kill tax credits for electric vehicles and spur fossil fuel production on federally protected land.

Donald Trump is strongly considering classifying Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations, CNN reported Wednesday. This designation would make it easier to use military force against them.  

The president-elect first floated this idea in 2019, but backed off after receiving backlash from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his own Justice Department officials. 

“Basically, you take the gloves off, meaning it can be anywhere from having joint operations where you’re physically doing things or where you’re actively targeting, maybe once again through finances, you’re turning loose [the] DOJ and FBI,” Republican Representative Tony Gonzales said of the reintroduced idea. 

Gonzalez is right to a degree: Treating cartels as terrorist organizations would increase the angles of attack for the federal government, potentially creating a larger pool of defendants. But the brunt of this change would fall unjustly on immigrants. 

The designation would make it much harder for immigrants and asylum-seekers to gain access to the U.S. given the proximity they often have to exploitative cartel activity. Many immigrants travel through cartel territory on their way to the southern border, and often have to pay them a toll to do so. This would cause immigrants to violate a statute surrounding providing funds to terrorist organizations. 

If this comes to fruition, Trump and border czar Tom Homan would be making an already hostile situation even more contentious.

Senator Tommy Tuberville is so excited for Donald Trump to keep chasing the Panama Canal that he’s now imagining his own fantastical version of events where the U.S. uses the waterway to wage war on China.

During an interview on Fox Business Tuesday, Tuberville got a little creative when cheerleading Trump’s outlandish push to take control of the trade route.

“We’ve gotta take the Panama Canal back, we’ve got to do something because if we’re gonna happen to go to war with China over Taiwan, and they were to shut the Panama Canal down, we’d have to go eight to ten thousand miles longer just to get things back to the war zone, if we had to go from the East Coast to China,” Tuberville said.

While Trump was once friendly with Taiwan, he criticized it on the campaign trail. The president-elect argued that the island should have to pay the U.S. for protection, and accused it of stealing U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.

Trump also promised several times on the campaign trail that his administration would be a peaceful one, so his dumbest admiral airing his ideas about going to war seems at odds with that phony foreign policy.

Trump’s threat to claim the Panama Canal comes as he has upped the ante on several expansionist musings, including using economic forces to turn Canada into the fifty-first state and buying Greenland from Denmark.

France is warning Donald Trump against attempting to annex Greenland, saying that the European Union would not “let other nations in the world—whoever they might be—attack its sovereign borders.”

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot made the statement to public radio broadcaster France Inter on Wednesday, adding that he doesn’t expect Trump to invade the autonomous Danish territory. However, Barrot added that the world is witnessing a “return of the law of the strongest.”

Barrot’s words came after Trump refused to rule out using military force to retake Greenland and the Panama Canal in a rambling press conference on Tuesday. His son Donald Jr. also visited Greenland Tuesday in what appeared to be an attempt to legitimize the president-elect’s plans. The leaders of both Denmark and Greenland have said the territory is not for sale.

Antagonizing allies is a crazy, if typical, way for Trump to start his second term, especially a NATO member like Denmark that has boosted its defense spending, as Trump has demanded. Drawing the ire of France and the European Union doesn’t bode well for the future, especially with Trump planning to institute tariffs as soon as he is sworn in.

Trump is also threatening Canada with making it the “51st state” and angered Panama’s president with his desire to retake the canal. If he’s serious about any of his territorial ambitions, Trump might face serious opposition, with countries taking action against the United States.

A Fox News employee gave Trump’s team a set of questions in advance of an Iowa Town Hall in January, according to an upcoming book from Politico’s Alex Isenstadt. If true, this is a blatant violation of  basic journalistic ethics—and yet another blatant example of Trump’s hypocrisy, given that he has accused Democrats of doing “cheating” at debates for years.  That town hall, moreover, occurred at a crucial moment in the race: It took place as Trump’s Republican rivals for the party’s nomination were debating for the final time.

“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. ‘Holy [shit],’ the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started,” writes Isenstadt.

Trump’s team proceeded to “workshop” their answers to the questions, which touched on political violence, his business activity, and his indictments. 

“While we do not have any evidence of this occurring, and Alex Isenstadt has conveniently refused to release the images for fact checking, we take these matters very seriously and plan to investigate should there prove to be a breach within the network,” a spokesperson for Fox News said. 

Revenge, Isenstadt’s book, comes out in March.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Wednesday that he will release some of the details from special counsel Jack Smith’s final report on Donald Trump’s criminal cases, but not all of them.

In a filing, Garland outlined his intentions to publicize the final memo on Trump’s 2020 election subversion case, which constitutes “volume one” of Smith’s report, while handing the controversial details of Trump’s classified documents case to the chair and ranking member of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

The decision immediately flouts an order from Judge Aileen Cannon, who caved to a request from two of Trump’s co-defendants Tuesday. She ruled that the Justice Department would not be allowed to release Smith’s final report on his two federal criminal investigations into the president-elect. But the joint request to block the release of the 2020 election report, which names neither of the co-defendants, is little more than a reach, according to Garland.

“Defendants [Walt] Nauta and [Carlos] De Oliveira have no cognizable interest in that volume of the Final Report, however, nor any plausible theory of Article III standing that would justify their asking this Court to grant relief with respect to it,” Garland wrote in Wednesday’s filing. “Nor would there be any legal basis for any other interested party to seek to block release of Volume One.”

Garland’s notes on Trump’s classified documents case are doubly strategic. By restricting the release of volume two of Smith’s report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, Garland undermined the “essential premise” of Nauta and De Oliveira’s emergency motion, which claimed that the immediate public release of the report would cause “irreparable prejudice to defendants’ criminal proceedings.”

Garland “determined that he will not make a public release of Volume Two while defendants’ cases remain pending,” the filing reads. “That should be the end of the matter.”

Cannon’s Tuesday ruling stated that Garland, the DOJ, Smith, and “all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” could not publish any part of the report until three days after an appeals court rules on the case.

It’s unclear if the Trump-appointed judge even had the authority to make such a decision, as the case is pending outside of her jurisdiction.

This story has been updated.

Even Donald Trump’s former allies don’t understand Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to block forthcoming details of special counsel Jack Smith’s case against the president-elect.

On Tuesday, Cannon caved to a request from two of Trump’s co-defendants, ruling that the Justice Department is not allowed to release Smith’s final report on two of the president-elect’s federal criminal investigations.

In an interview that night with CNN, former Trump attorney Ty Cobb said he believed that Cannon’s continued involvement in cloaking the details of the case made her one of Trump’s favorite tools.

“Why do you think, Ty, Cannon blocked the report?” asked OutFront host Erin Burnett.

“The only reason she’s shining is, she’s his tool and he polishes her religiously,” Cobb said. “He gets the results he needs from her. The Eleventh Circuit has already, as we know, over two years ago, had to admonish her extensively.”

Cannon was legally scolded by the Eleventh Circuit in 2022, when the appeals court unanimously vacated her decision to appoint a special master to oversee the documents obtained by the FBI after their raid of Mar-a-Lago. At the time, the court wrote that Cannon “improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction” in the case and that the judicial system could not “write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant.

“Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so,” the appeals court added.

Cobb argued that Cannon’s heavy hand in Trump’s case had “created remedies” for the president-elect “out of whole cloth.”

“I suspect they will do so again quickly,” Cobb said, envisioning more reprimands for Cannon by the Eleventh Circuit. “They may be prepared to mitigate the stain that she is and the stain that she’s created again for the judiciary quickly on this.”

Cannon’s ruling stated that Attorney General Merrick Garland, the Department of Justice, Smith, and “all of their officers, agents, and employees, and all persons acting in active concert or participation with such individuals” could not publish any part of the report until three days after an appeals court rules on the case.

It’s unclear if the Trump-appointed judge even had the authority to make such a decision, as the case is pending outside of her jurisdiction.

Former Representative Matt Gaetz is considering running for office again, just weeks after getting chased out of the last one. 

Gaetz, the Florida Republican who allegedly paid several women and an underage girl for sexual encounters, is “starting to think about running for governor” in 2026, he told The Tampa Bay Times Tuesday.

“I have a compelling vision for the state,” Gaetz said. “I understand how to fix the insurance problem, and it’s not to hand the keys to the state over to the insurance industry. If I run, I would be the most pro-consumer candidate on the Republican side.”

Last month, the House Ethics Committee published a long-awaited report on Gaetz’s alleged misconduct, and concluded that the MAGA acolyte “took advantage of the economic vulnerability of young women to lure them into sexual activity.” In total, he paid out more than $63,000 to more than a dozen women and one 17-year-old girl.  

Gaetz left Congress last year after he was nominated to serve as Donald Trump’s attorney general. Unfortunately for him, his candidacy was so unpopular he was forced to withdraw his nomination and was replaced by Pam Bondi, who is set to be confirmed next week. When he didn’t return for the start of the 119th Congress last week, his former colleagues clapped. 

Gaetz said the revelations about his behavior wouldn’t have any impact on a potential run for governor. “Those lies have been told about me for years,” Gaetz said. “They’ve never affected my ability to win elections.”