Ketanji Brown Jackson Blasts Supreme Court’s Increasingly Shady Moves

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson slammed the “inequitable” and “inappropriate” way the court ruled to allow Donald Trump to proceed with his deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

In a scathing dissent, Jackson voiced her disapproval of the court’s Monday decision to strike down U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg’s injunction pausing deportations under the AEA, which was used last month to expedite the deportation of more than 100 alleged gang members to a prison in El Salvador notorious for human rights abuses.

“The President of the United States has invoked a centuries-old wartime statute to whisk people away to a notoriously brutal, foreign-run prison,” Jackson wrote. “For lovers of liberty, this should be quite concerning.”

The court’s newest justice also took issue with how her colleagues had ruled on the issue, as part of the bench’s emergency, or shadow, docket, which sees immediate action on issues ranging from scheduling proceedings to requests to halt lower court rulings—like the government’s request to halt Boasberg’s injunction.

“I lament that the Court appears to have embarked on a new era of procedural variability, and that it has done so in such a casual, inequitable, and, in my view, inappropriate manner,” she wrote.

“At least when the Court went off base in the past, it left a record so posterity could see how it went wrong,” she wrote. Jackson then cited Korematsu v. United States, in which the Supreme Court had ruled that the government was right to order the incarceration of Japanese-American citizens during World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt had used the Alien Enemies Act to justify the brutality of Japanese internment.

The Supreme Court condemned its ruling in Korematsu in 2018, calling it “morally repugnant” and “gravely wrong,” but at the same time rubber-stamped Trump’s travel ban targeting six Muslim-majority countries.

Jackson argued that the court hadn’t learned anything.

“With more and more of our most significant rulings taking place in the shadows of our emergency docket, today’s court leaves less and less of a trace. But make no mistake: We are just as wrong now as we have been in the past, with similarly devastating consequences. It just seems we are now less willing to face it,” she wrote.

In recent years, justices have begun to issue far more significant rulings through the shadow docket, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Unlike the 60 or 70 merit docket cases that the justices decide each term, shadow docket cases do not receive extensive briefings or hearings, and their decisions are accompanied by scant explanations.

“Surely, the question whether such Government action is consistent with our Constitution and laws warrants considerable thought and attention from the Judiciary,” Jackson wrote.

“But this Court now sees fit to intervene,” she said, “hastily dashing off a four-paragraph per curiam opinion discarding the District Court’s order based solely on a new legal pronouncement that, one might have thought, would require significant deliberation.”

In his latest rewrite of European history, Donald Trump made a ridiculous and sympathetic declaration about the Nazis.

Amid the tariff chaos he spurred, Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office Monday, where he was asked by reporters about his plan to bring about the release of the 59 Israeli hostages being held captive in Gaza by Hamas.

In typical Trump fashion, the president dodged the question and went on a bizarre rant that seemingly remembered Nazis for … their sympathy.

“I said to them, was there any sign of love?” Trump said, recounting his conversation with released hostages.

“Did the, Hamas, show any signs of like, help? Or liking you? Did they wink? Did they give you a piece of bread extra? Did they give you a meal on the side? … Like, you know, what happened in Germany?” Trump said, absurdly comparing the hostages’ situation to the Holocaust, which murdered six million Jews.

“People would try and help people that were in unbelievable distress,” the president went on, suggesting that the Nazis were known for their generosity.

“No, they didn’t do that, they’d slap us,” Trump said the hostages told him about Hamas, while sitting next to the man who is currently leading Israel’s genocide in Gaza. “Their hatred is unbelievable.”

Trump’s claim about Nazi kindness sent people reeling on social media.

“This isn’t just delusional. It’s Holocaust cosplay. He’s romanticizing genocide like it’s a fucking history podcast,” one user wrote on X.

“Equating hostages held by Hamas to victims in Nazi Germany isn’t just offensive, it’s also a grotesque distortion of history,” wrote another. “He’s always saying the first thing that pops into his head without understanding the weight of those words. And he’s sitting next to Israeli Prime Minister. Crazy stuff!”

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to the Department of Commerce Tuesday as part of a new investigation into Elon Musk’s glaring conflicts of interest.

In a six-page letter to acting General Counsel John K. Guenther, Ranking Member Gerry Connolly and Vice Ranking Member Jasmine Crockett requested information about how Commerce intends to prevent Musk from skirting ethics rules to use the department to enrich himself. 

The letter, shared exclusively with The New Republic, outlined several instances where Commerce’s operations had openly benefited Musk’s businesses. The representatives requested that the department provide a range of communications and documents by April 22 to demonstrate how the officials intended to prevent the billionaire bureaucrat from exploiting the government.  

“At Commerce, where Mr. Musk’s companies have received significant financial benefits and have the potential to receive vast amounts of new business, his defiance of recusal laws and control of Commerce’s operations directly benefit his businesses,” the members wrote. “The known conflicts of interest presented by this arrangement are illegal and must be addressed immediately.”

The representatives argued that Musk had been wrongly classified as a “special government employee” as part of an effort to skirt ethics requirements and that his authority to conduct sweeping cuts and recommend massive layoffs as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency was consistent with being in a high-level officer position that requires Senate confirmation. Still, ethics laws were in place to prevent special government employees from taking part in matters that could affect their personal finances. 

“The law, however, has not stopped Mr. Musk. On the contrary, Mr. Musk’s ability to enrich himself through DOGE is a textbook example of corruption at the taxpayers’ expense,” the letter stated.   

The letter cited several instances in which Donald Trump’s Department of Commerce had been poised to enrich Musk’s businesses, which have raked in a whopping total of $38 billion from government contracts over the past 20 years. 

The letter pointed to DOGE’s mass layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, launching concerns that Musk intended to use contracts for his companies SpaceX and Starlink to fill in the holes he’d created and that he could reasonably access information at NOAA that could give him an advantage over his competitors.

In March, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that his department would begin an overhaul of the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment Program, or BEAD. After four years, the $42.5 billion project to expand internet access across the country hadn’t yet connected a single person, and Lutnick blamed “woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations.”

Lutnick’s promise of a “tech-neutral” approach, which will make way for the use of satellites in addition to fiber-optic cables, could offer a bigger piece of the pie to Musk’s Starlink. The company was originally expected to haul in around $4.1 billion under the previous rules but could rake in anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion if Lutnick’s changes are accepted.

BEAD’s outgoing director sent a blistering email to colleagues warning that Musk was poised to profit at the expense of the very people they were trying to help. 

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” former BEAD Director Evan Feinman wrote in mid-March.

But Starlink isn’t the only one of Musk’s businesses to benefit from the actions of Commerce. 

When Tesla’s sinking stock started tanking last month, Lutnick appeared on Fox News to urge viewers to buy shares of the billionaire bureaucrat’s electric car company. 

“I mean who wouldn’t invest in Elon Musk, you gotta be kidding me!” Lutnick raved. Notably, Cabinet members do not typically endorse products, as the Code of Federal Regulations bars public servants from “using their office’s platform to endorse companies and products.”

And Lutnick isn’t Musk’s only ally at Commerce. Michael Grimes, a finance executive who worked closely on deals for Musk’s companies, was recently made senior adviser at Commerce, where he will reportedly head a U.S. sovereign wealth fund that could potentially direct billions to his old friend. 

The letter also pointed to Trump’s dismissal of the inspector general at Commerce, who would’ve acted as a watchdog for any corruption or abuse. 

Connolly and Crockett’s letter set an April 22 deadline for Commerce to provide detailed lists of all Commerce matters involving Musk’s businesses, all steps Commerce is taking to ensure compliance with ethics laws related to Musk’s businesses, and all actions Commerce is taking to ensure that Musk was not receiving information that would give him a business advantage over his competitors. 

The letter also requested the names of any federal employees at Commerce who had been “in any way removed” from their positions by Musk or DOGE, as well as a list of all exemptions that Commerce has received from Trump’s freeze on federal funding. 

Elon Musk, who wants AI to replace federal workers, is now using it to spy on them.

After speaking to 20 people close to the situation, Reuters has reported that officials within the Trump administration told federal employees that DOGE “technologists” are using AI to monitor “anti-Trump or anti-Musk language” at the Environmental Protection Agency. One person also said DOGE is using Musk’s Grok AI chatbot—an aspiring ChatGPT competitor—to make massive cuts to the government.

“Be careful what you say, what you type and what you do,” a manager allegedly told one of Reuters’s sources.

This is a grimly ironic development for Musk, who constantly claims that he and his X platform are bulwarks of free speech. The EPA has yet to comment.

“[It] sounds like an abuse of government power to suppress or deter speech that the president of the United States doesn’t like,” government ethics expert Kathleen Clark told Reuters.

DOGE employees are also using Signal—the app that landed Mike Walz in hot water for a week—to message each other. And on top of that, DOGE employees are working live on Google Docs instead of using the single copy vetting and chain of custody process that is standard operating procedure for the government.

If these allegations of spying, Signalgate II, and the use of Google Docs are true, they’re a very serious breach of security and a demonstrable lack of transparency from DOGE.

In any sane reality, President Trump’s deportation of immigrants based on an eighteenth-century law, with no right to due process, would be swiftly remedied by the courts. But to conservatives, such an action is tantamount to treason.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the high court’s liberals Monday by dissenting against Trump’s use of the “Alien Enemies Act,” drawing the ire of the MAGA faithful. While the court still ruled to uphold the president’s deportation by a 5–4 margin, Barrett, appointed by Trump in 2020, still received vitriol from the right for her decision.

Even a U.S. senator got in on the attacks, along with tech oligarch Elon Musk.

A few commentators engaged in some thinly veiled racism targeting Barrett’s adopted children.

This isn’t the first time that Barrett has broken with conservative orthodoxy in her rulings, showing that at times she thinks for herself, much to the right’s consternation. The funny part is that she is still quite conservative, voting to overturn Roe v. Wade and reliably joining her fellow right-wing justices in rulings regarding religious freedom, capital punishment, and affirmative action. While her dissent Monday wasn’t enough to tip the court’s ruling, it shows that there’s a glimmer of hope on the Supreme Court that it won’t always rubber-stamp Trump’s abuses of power.

China has promised to “fight to the end” in the face of even more tariffs from President Trump.

“If China does not withdraw its 34% increase above their already long term trading abuses by tomorrow, April 8th, 2025, the United States will impose ADDITIONAL Tariffs on China of 50%, effective April 9th,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Monday after China threatened retaliation against Trump’s tariffs. “Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated!”

China’s Commerce Ministry matched that energy.

“The U.S. threat to escalate tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake, which once again exposes the U.S.’s blackmail nature,” the ministry said Tuesday. “If the U.S. insists on its own way, China will fight to the end.… China will resolutely take countermeasures to safeguard its own rights and interests.”

The Chinese Embassy in the United States responded with similar ire.

“The U.S. so-called ‘reciprocal tariffs’ against China are groundless and a typical practice of unilateral bullying,” the embassy wrote on X Tuesday morning. “The countermeasures China has adopted are entirely legitimate actions aimed at protecting its sovereignty, security, and development interests, as well as maintaining a normal international trade order.

“There is no winner in a trade war and protectionism leads nowhere,” the embassy continued. “Pressuring and threatening are not the right way to engage with the country.”

If Trump goes through with all of his tariffs, the U.S. will levy a combined tariff of 104 percent on Chinese products: The new 50 percent tariffs, plus the 20 percent for alleged fentanyl trafficking, and then the 34 percent he announced last week.

Trump’s threats have already caused global stock markets to tumble and will likely only continue to erode confidence in the United States as a legitimate trading partner, as China and its massive economy look to less volatile actors like the European Union.

A mother and her three children were released from ICE detention Monday, after they were detained during an immigration raid in Sackets Harbor, New York, late last month.

Public outrage has overtaken the tiny town—which also happens to be border czar Tom Homan’s hometown—after a woman and three children, grades three, 10, and 11, were among seven individuals detained during a March 27 raid on a large dairy farm.

ICE officials said the raid had targeted a South African national who was charged with trafficking child sexual abuse material but that they had apprehended a total of seven people who lacked documentation. All seven people, including the family, were sent to a detention facility in Texas to await removal proceedings. Homan told the local news last week that the family had been moved to Texas for questioning and was being kept in an “open-air” residential facility, pending a decision on their removal.

“During investigations like that, we have to ensure that any children within that area are safe. There’s a process during these investigations where, could these children—could that family be a material witness in this horrendous crime? Can they provide information and evidence in this crime? Were they victimized within this crime? So the due diligence was done,” said Homan.

Sackets Harbor school Principal Jaime Cook wrote a scathing letter to ICE officials insisting that the children hadn’t done anything wrong. “They had declared themselves to immigration judges, attended court on their assigned dates, and were following the legal process. They are not criminals,” Cook wrote.

“They lived in a house on the same road as a house that ICE had a warrant for. The fact that ICE went to their door is unfathomable. The fact that our students were handcuffed and put into the same van as the alleged criminal from down the street is unconscionable,” Cook wrote.

The arrests sparked outrage across Central and Northern New York. Nearly 1,000 people gathered in Sackets Harbor on Saturday to protest the family’s detention by ICE. The population of Sackets Harbor is roughly 1,350 people.

The family was released from custody on Monday, according to a statement from Jennifer Gaffney, the superintendent of the Sackets Harbor Central School District.

“My colleagues and I are relieved and grateful to share that, after 11 days of uncertainty, our students and their mother are returning home,” Gaffney said.

“In the midst of this difficult time, the strength, compassion, and resilience of our community have shone through. We are very thankful to everyone who has reached out with kindness and offered support.”

Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, pointed out that there was an obvious lesson from the family’s release. “This is a friendly reminder that ICE is not entirely immune to the court of public opinion,” he wrote on X Monday.

The European Union graciously offered to negotiate with Donald Trump on tariffs before retaliating, but the U.S. president is too blinded by his own conspiracy to even consider the deal.

On Monday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen offered the United States a “zero-for-zero tariff” on cars and industrial goods to avoid a trade war, a pretty generous offer given Trump slapped 20 percent tariffs on the EU—and pretty much everywhere else—last week.

“We have offered zero-for-zero tariffs for industrial goods as we have successfully done with many other trading partners. Because Europe is always ready for a good deal. So we keep it on the table,” von der Leyen said in a statement.

Trump, however, told reporters Monday afternoon that the deal isn’t enough. “The EU has been very tough over the years, I always say it was formed to really do damage to the United States and trade,” Trump said. “That’s the reason it was formed.”

In case you forgot, the EU was not, in fact, formed to screw the United States but to foster peace and cooperation among European countries post-World War II. It was founded in 1992 and is made up of 27 countries and seven major institutions that manage a common budget, facilitate trade, and make laws.

The president continued his rewrite of European history, claiming the EU was formed solely “to create a unified force against the United States for trade.” He added that the union has used NATO—an alliance that the United States is a part of—to take advantage of the United States.

The outlandish rant is Trump’s way of saying, no, he won’t accept von der Leyen’s deal. It’s a refusal that will likely result in further retaliatory tariffs on the United States as an economic recession looms.

Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser put out a list of outrageous demands Monday for other countries inflicted by the president’s tariffs to start “burden sharing.”

Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, delivered a speech at the Hudson Institute complete with a to-do list for other countries looking to lighten the load that “unfair barriers to trade” and “unsustainable trade deficits” have supposedly inflicted on the United States.

Miran said that these factors had led to a “decline of our manufacturing workforce by over a third since its peak and a reduction in our share of world manufacturing production of 40 percent.”

It’s worth noting that while manufacturing employment has gone down, U.S. manufacturing output is up and nearing its all-time high of December 2007. Who exactly will actually work all of these hypothetical manufacturing jobs? No one seems to know! Trump’s own secretary of commerce said earlier this month that he planned to use automation to replace cheap labor, and the treasury secretary suggested Monday that maybe ousted federal workers could pick up some shifts.

Other countries should work to improve “burden sharing” to address the issues, a process that could take many forms, said Miran.

For instance, countries could roll over and accept Trump’s tariffs without retaliation. “Critically, retaliation will exacerbate rather than improve the distribution of burdens and make it even more difficult for us to finance global public goods,” Miran said in his remarks.

Miran said that countries could “stop unfair and harmful trading practices” by buying more American products, specifically noting that countries could boost defense spending and procurement from the U.S. by “taking strain off our servicemembers and creating jobs here.”

He also suggested that countries invest in U.S. manufacturing and open factories in the U.S. “They won’t face tariffs if they make their stuff in this country,” Miran said.

Finally, Miran said that countries could “simply write checks” to the Treasury Department.

The CEA chair did not indicate whether compliance with these suggestions would alleviate the—in some cases—very steep tariffs imposed by Trump.

Miran argued that other countries ought to comply with Trump’s demands for more money because of the “global public goods” that the U.S. provides, including global security and the dollar and other reserve assets, “which make possible the global trading and financial system which has supported the greatest era of prosperity mankind has ever known.

“In my view, to continue providing these twin global public goods, there needs to be improved burden-sharing at the global level,” Miran said. “If other nations want to benefit from the U.S. geopolitical and financial umbrella, then they need to pull their weight, and pay their fair share. The costs cannot be solely borne by everyday Americans who have already given so much.”

But that’s not how public goods work: If you have to pay to use them, then they’re not actually public goods.

Miran singled out China as America’s “biggest adversary” responsible for weakening U.S. manufacturing, and even blamed it for the 2008 financial crisis. Trump is currently mounting a trade war with Beijing, and threatened a new round of tariffs Monday, bringing the total tariff rate on imports from China to 104 percent.

Miran insisted that the U.S. would somehow survive not being able to do business with its largest trading partners. “America has plenty of substitution options: We can make stuff at home, or we can buy from countries that treat us fairly instead of from countries that take advantage of us,” he said. But last week, Trump placed tariffs of at least 10 percent on nearly every country.

Trump said Sunday that he’d told global leaders that he wanted to erase the U.S. trade deficit because he viewed any deficit as a “loss,” though that’s not quite how economics works.

Donald Trump responded to a question about confusing tariff language from his administration by adding to the confusion. 

During a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office Monday, a reporter asked the president about “mixed messages from your administration. You’re talking about negotiations and yet others in your administration are saying these tariffs are actually permanent.” 

Trump’s response was anything but clarifying. 

“Well, it can both be true,” Trump responded. “There can be permanent tariffs and there can also be negotiations, because there are things that we need beyond tariffs. We need open borders.”

Is Trump actually going back on his vehement anti-immigrant, pro–border closure stances? His words seem to make little sense coupled with his mass deportation policies and attempts to restrict border crossings. Perhaps he’s referring to fewer restrictions on trade, which is probably how his surrogates and spokespeople will try to spin his remarks, and it could also be a slip of the tongue related to his ongoing cognitive decline. 

Trump’s tariff policy is so erratic and ill thought out that it’s nearly impossible to know what he actually means by “open borders.” In his bonkers remarks about trying to make Canada the fifty-first state, he’s complained about an “artificial line” separating the U.S. from its northern neighbor, but he has also long complained about crime, drugs, and rapists coming from Mexico through the America’s southern border. One thing is likely, though: The president will contradict his own remarks within days or even hours.