{"id":15339,"date":"2025-03-18T18:45:05","date_gmt":"2025-03-19T01:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=15339"},"modified":"2025-03-18T19:17:52","modified_gmt":"2025-03-19T02:17:52","slug":"courts-largely-holding-against-rampant-trump-musk-lawlessness-for-now-bradcast-3182025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=15339","title":{"rendered":"Courts Largely Holding Against Rampant Trump, Musk Lawlessness. For Now: &#8216;BradCast&#8217; 3\/18\/2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/BradBlog.com\/Images\/BradCast_USCourtHouse_031825.jpg\" hspace=\"6\" vspace=\"3\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\">We remain on the precipice of a Constitutional Crisis on today&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/BradBlog.com\/BradCast\"><i>BradCast<\/i><\/a>, as our Man Baby President has now begun defying court orders. Some reasonably argue we are there already, but we will <i>truly<\/i> be there when (and if, but mostly when) he defies an order from the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court. For now, he&#8217;s testing the waters by defying lower court orders. For the most part, those courts are largely holding firm in defense of the Constitution and rule of law, as the Administration continues to lose in ruling after ruling. Sadly, that hasn&#8217;t prevented people from dying thanks to our reckless, lawless President and his top fundraiser&#8217;s wasteful, fraudulent, abusive and deadly closures of critical Executive Branch agencies. [<i>Audio link to full show follows this summary.<\/i>]\n<p>Among today&#8217;s coverage&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In a pathetic, early morning, MOSTLY ALL-CAPS <a href=\"https:\/\/truthsocial.com\/@realDonaldTrump\/posts\/114183576937425149\">social media rant<\/a> today, <b>Donald Trump<\/b> demanded that a federal judge &#8212; who reasonably ruled temporarily against his invocation of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.archives.gov\/milestone-documents\/alien-and-sedition-acts\">Alien Enemies Act of 1798<\/a> to deport hundreds of Venezuelans &#8212;  be &#8220;IMPEACHED!!!&#8221;. The law has only ever been used during wartime, as it mandates the detention, imprisonment or deportation of non-citizens in the U.S. only from a &#8220;foreign nation or government&#8221; that has &#8220;declared war&#8221; against us or that has &#8220;perpetrated, attempted, or threatened&#8221; &#8220;any invasion or predatory incursion.&#8221; Venezuela has done none of those things. The ruling against Trump followed an unusual late-night, emergency hearing on Saturday. The judge ordered the Administration to pause deportation to an <b>El Salvador<\/b> prison of alleged Venezuelan gang-member migrants until Trump&#8217;s use of the war-time law could be further adjudicated. U.S. District Judge<b> James Boasberg<\/b> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2025\/03\/15\/trump-deportation-lawsuit-00232121\">ordered<\/a> any U.S. migrant flights en route to El Salvador be returned the U.S.  The Administration appears to have ignored the court order and has been <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2025\/03\/18\/nx-s1-5331986\/deportation-flight-tren-de-aragua-justice-department-boasberg\">stonewalling<\/a> the judge&#8217;s demand for information on when planes left and landed ever since. Thus Trump called for his &#8220;IMPEACHMENT!!!&#8221; winning an unusual, if very gentle, slap on the wrist from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice <b>John Roberts<\/b> in a rare <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/politics\/supreme-court\/chief-justice-pushes-back-calls-impeach-judges-rule-trump-rcna196922\">public response<\/a> today.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Late last week, a federal judge in California ordered the reinstatement of thousands of federal workers <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2025\/03\/13\/politics\/judge-opm-probationary-employees-fired-hearing?cid=ios_app\">at six different federal agencies<\/a>, after finding that <b>Elon Musk<\/b> and his <b>DOGE<\/b> Bros unlawfully fired them without the legal authority to do so. An hour or two later, a federal judge in Maryland, in a separate lawsuit on a different legal basis, ordered that federal workers <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2025\/03\/13\/nx-s1-5325694\/maryland-court-fired-federal-employees-trump\">at 18 different agencies<\/a> must be restored to their previous positions. The judge in CA has since <a href=\"https:\/\/storage.courtlistener.com\/recap\/gov.uscourts.cand.444883\/gov.uscourts.cand.444883.138.0.pdf\">made clear<\/a> that rehiring the workers only to put them on immediate paid leave is <i>also<\/i> in violation of his order.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>In a major ruling today, a federal district court judge in Maryland ordered the <b>U.S. Agency for International Development<\/b> (USAID) &#8212; which Trump, Musk and his DOGE Bro wrecking crew shut down almost entirely in the earliest days of his second term &#8212; to be reopened. The judge <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/usaid-federal-judge-trump-administration-bdc919a5d98eda5ab72a32fdfe2f147d\">ruled<\/a> that Musk &#8220;likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways&#8221; in shuttering the critical international aid agency, which Musk <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/elonmusk\/status\/1886307316804263979?lang=en\">described<\/a> on his social media site \u00e0\u00afn early February as having personally fed &#8220;into the wood chipper&#8221;. USAID, among other critical work, supplies food to starving children and life-saving medicine to the sick around the globe. While Musk, the world&#8217;s richest man, has claimed that &#8220;No one has died as a result&#8221; of his (unlawful, unconstitutional) closure of the agency, the <i>New York Times<\/i>&#8216; <b>Nicholas Kristof<\/b>, in a must-read, gut-wrenching report (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2025\/03\/15\/opinion\/foreign-aid-cuts-impact.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5E4.iNK_.9dfZOl9R3xvR&#038;smid=url-share\"><i>gift link<\/i><\/a>) traveled to <strong>South Sudan<\/strong> and elsewhere to find &#8220;that is not true&#8221;, before going on to document how and where &#8220;the efforts by Musk and President Trump are already leading children to die&#8221;. Unless aid is somehow quickly restored, Kristoff reports, those efforts are likely to kill millions in the coming months and years.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>The wasteful, fraudulent and abusive efforts by Trump, Musk and DOGE has not been entirely for naught, however. Turns out someone finally <a href=\"https:\/\/www.seattletimes.com\/seattle-news\/politics\/heres-a-dead-person-on-social-security-in-seattle-with-plenty-to-say\/\">found a &#8220;dead&#8221; person<\/a> receiving Social Security! Even if that person turned out to be very much alive and is now trying to get the funds that were suspended for some reason by the <b>Social Security Administration<\/b> in mid-February, turned back on. The DOGE dismantling of the SSA  &#8212; where field offices are being shuttered and 7,000 workers are scheduled to be laid off &#8212; isn&#8217;t helping.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Finally, Desi Doyen joins us for <a href=\"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=15338\">our latest <i>Green News Report<\/i><\/a>, as deadly <b>extreme storms<\/b> killed more than 40 people in the U.S. over this past weekend; Trump&#8217;s mass firings at <b>NOAA<\/b> are set to undermine accurate weather forecasting; and his <b>Interior Dept.<\/b> just cancelled the six-month old permits for construction of an off-shore wind-farm in <b>New Jersey<\/b>&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\".\/Images\/Speaker_Icon_24.png\" style=\"width: 24px; float: none; vertical-align: middle;\"><span style=\"font-size: 18px; line-height: 18px;\"> <b><i><a href=\"https:\/\/BradBlog.com\/audio\/BradCast_BradFriedman-CourtsHolding-TrumpImpeachThreat-DeathsAfterUSAID-SSA_031825.mp3\">CLICK TO LISTEN OR DOWNLOAD SHOW!&#8230;<\/a><\/i><\/b><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><center><b>* * *<\/b><\/center><i>While we post <a href=\"https:\/\/BradBlog.com\/BradCast\"><\/i>The BradCast<i><\/a> here every day, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they&#8217;re available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at <a href=\"https:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/the-bradcast-w-brad-friedman\/id803467610\">iTunes<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pandora.com\/podcast\/the-bradcast-w-brad-friedman\/PC:1000025838\">Pandora<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/tunein.com\/radio\/The-BradCast-with-Brad-Friedman-p477565\/\">TuneIn<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.iheart.com\/podcast\/256-the-bradcast-w-brad-friedm-30973643\/\">iHeart<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/The-BradCast-w-Brad-Friedman\/dp\/B08JJRN86R\/ref=sr_1_1\">Amazon<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/podcastgen\/bradcast\/feed.xml\">our native RSS feed<\/a>!<\/i><\/p>\n<p><!--BB-DONATEPITCH-START--><\/p>\n<div style=\"background:#f5f0e0; border:2px solid #6b5a2e; border-radius:6px; padding:10px 14px; text-align:center; font-family:Georgia,serif;\"><span style=\"display:block; margin:0 0 8px 0; color:#3a2e0e; font-size:0.95em; line-height:1.5;\"><strong>The BRAD BLOG<\/strong>, <em>The BradCast<\/em> and <em>Green News Report<\/em> are all 100% independent and 100% listener and reader supported!<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/Donate\" style=\"display:inline-block; background:#6b5a2e; color:#ffffff; padding:6px 18px; border-radius:4px; font-weight:bold; text-decoration:none; font-family:Georgia,serif; font-size:0.9em;\">Please CLICK HERE to help support our work today!<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!--BB-DONATEPITCH-END--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We remain on the precipice of a Constitutional Crisis on today&#8217;s BradCast, as our Man Baby President has now begun defying court orders. Some reasonably argue we are there already, but we will truly be there when (and if, but mostly when) he defies an order from the corrupted U.S. Supreme Court. For now, he&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,785,89,675,543,869,479,1736,288,1129,261,178,725,477,50,947,666,127,2046,541],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-15339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountability","category-africa","category-media-appearance","category-bradcast","category-climate-change","category-dept-of-interior","category-donald-trump","category-elon-musk","category-health-care","category-ice","category-immigration","category-impeachment","category-john-roberts","category-kpfk","category-new-jersey","category-noaa","category-social-security","category-the-constitution","category-usaid","category-wind"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15339"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=15339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}