Sunday, May 04th
Last update07:06:21 AM GMT
Political Glance
Barbara Lee, a trailblazing former member of Congress, has been elected as the next mayor of Oakland, California, after fending off an insurgent challenge from the center at a critical moment for the Bay Area city.
Lee defeated the former city council member Loren Taylor after nine rounds of ranked-choice voting gave her more than 52% of the vote to Taylor’s 47%, according to the Alameda county registrar of voters.
Protesters poured into the streets of cities and towns across the United States again on Saturday, in the second wave of protests this month, as organizers seek to turn discontent with Donald Trump’s presidency into a mass movement that will eventually translate into action at the ballot box.
By early afternoon, large protests were under way in Washington, New York and Chicago, with images of crowds cascading across social networks showing additional demonstrations in Rhode Island, Maryland, Wisconsin, Tennessee, South Carolina, Ohio, Kentucky, California and Pennsylvania, among others. Americans abroad also signaled their opposition to the Trump agenda in Dublin, Ireland, and other cities.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on Saturday, the Supreme Court issued an emergency order halting the Trump administration’s reported efforts to fly Venezuelan migrants to an El Salvador prison before they could challenge their deportation. The court’s late-night intervention is an extraordinary and highly unusual rebuke to the government, one that may well mark a turning point in the majority’s approach to this administration.
For months, SCOTUS has given the government every benefit of the doubt, accepting the Justice Department’s dubious assertions and awarding Trump immense deference. On Saturday, however, a majority of justices signaled that they no longer trust the administration to comply with the law, including the court’s own rulings. If that is indeed the case, we are likely careening toward a head-on conflict between the president and the court, with foundational principles of constitutional democracy hanging in the balance.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Friday halted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's attempt to lay off the vast majority of its employees and gut the agency.
Her order comes after the CFPB had sent reduction-in-force notices to more than 1,400 staffers across the agency on Thursday.
The CFPB had proceeded with layoffs after a three-judge panel last week had ruled the agency could conduct a reduction in force if it made "a particularized assessment" to determine which employees were "unnecessary" for the bureau's performance of its statutory duties.
But the CFPB's union immediately took legal action seeking to halt the mass layoffs, saying the agency had not in fact conducted the thorough assessment required by that three-judge panel.
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.
Page 7 of 180
