A Judge Blocks Trump Mail Ballot/USPS Ploy, Katie Phang Gets A Big Epstein Files Win, Notes On Trump And A New Politics Of Misery

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Morning all. I stayed up late last night to watch the US Men’s team final group stage game so things are a little behind here this morning. We didn’t get the win but no one got hurt, our star Pulisic appears to be over his injury, and our first game in the round of 32 is next Wednesday night at 8pm ET against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Here we go people!

A reminder that the great Heather Cox Richardson joins us live Monday at 2pm ET. A link will be sent in tomorrow’s Hopium post. Excited for this one!

Got a few things for you today……

Big Court Wins

We had another big voting rights win in the Courts yesterday. Here’s an excerpt of a new Democracy Docket article, Judge blocks Trump order that would have let USPS refuse to deliver mail ballots:

A federal judge in Massachusetts Thursday blocked federal agencies from implementing President Donald Trump’s sweeping attack on mail voting and his attempt to create a national voter registration list before the midterm elections.

District Judge Indira Talwani, a Barack Obama appointee, found that major parts of Trump’s March 2026 anti-voting executive order were “legally void” for exceeding the president’s power and violating the separation of powers by encroaching on states’ authority to administer elections.

“The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections,” Talwani wrote.

The 37-page ruling marks a major win for voters before the midterms. In siding with Democratic state attorneys general, Talwani largely stopped the United States Postal Service (USPS) from refusing to deliver mail ballots unless states hand over their voter lists to the Trump administration.

Her order also significantly prevents the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) from effectively creating a nationwide voter registration list by compiling lists of verified U.S. citizens eligible to vote.

This ruling comes on the heals of another win in the fight against Trump’s efforts to create a national voter registry. Here’s Democracy Docket again, In blow to Trump, federal judge blocks DHS from using citizenship database to purge voters

A federal judge in Washington D.C. blocked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from using its citizenship database to remove voters from registration rolls, striking a significant blow against President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional attempt to take control of federal elections.

In her 75-page decision Monday, District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan excoriated Trump and DHS’s implementation of his March 25 executive order for ignoring federal privacy laws as they overhauled the Systemic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system into a faulty citizenship checker.

“All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan wrote. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

Trump’s order directed DHS to overhaul SAVE, taking a database of the immigration status of roughly 26.5 million people and turning it into a citizenship-checking system with access to the personal information of most Americans. The upgrades allowed for bulk searches using partial social security numbers and made the database freely available to state and local election officials.

Our friend Katie Phang had a huge win yesterday in her fight to get DOJ to follow the law and release the full Epstein files. From Politico’s Todd Blanche ‘conceded’ violating law on Epstein files, judge finds:

The Justice Department has effectively conceded it is violating the law Congress passed last November requiring the public release of the vast majority of records relating to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a federal judge declared Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche essentially admitted the violations by failing to address allegations from independent journalist Katie Phang in a lawsuit seeking broader access to the records — including allegations against President Donald Trump.

“The Attorney General does not respond substantively to any of these arguments,” Sullivan, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, wrote in the opinion. “The Attorney General has conceded that he is in violation of the Act.”

Sullivan also issued a preliminary injunction that gives Blanche a week to release certain names and other information redacted by DOJ from the millions of pages of the Epstein files, or provide a more detailed explanation for withholding them.

Records subject to Sullivan’s order include notes of FBI interviews with a woman who has alleged that in the 1980s, when she was about 13, Epstein introduced her to Trump, who in turn assaulted her.

It also covers the identities of email correspondents with Epstein in eight exchanges regarding a “torture video” and sexual activity with minors; the names of co-defendants in a draft indictment, as well as the identities of potential co-conspirators and the identities of Department of Justice officials who exchanged messages about them; and “foreign language” materials that DOJ said that reviewers lacked the skills to translate and assess for potential redactions.

It’s been a good week all. Marc Elias will be joining us on Wednesday for a recorded interview to recap what’s happened in recent weeks and where we go from here.

Notes On A New Politics Of Misery

My main topic today is a bit of early sketch in something I’m calling “a new politics of misery.” The way I’ve talked about this previously is listing all the ways Trump is doing direct, material harm to the American people and the people of the world - the cuts to SNAP, the ACA and Medicaid are raising health care and food costs for struggling people, and making care harder to get - many will go hungry, and many more will be sicker and even die; tens of millions of women no longer have reproductive freedom common throughout the modern world; tariffs are raising prices, hurting small business and farmers, and are a gambit to shift the tax burden from wealthy people to working people; the failed war has super charged this dynamic; their pro-oil and pro-AI policies are making day to day energy/utility costs rise, and are slowing down the existential transition to cheaper, renewable energy sources; the undermining of vaccines is going to do incredible harm to individual people and families and our society as a whole; mass deportation and the terror regime that Miller and DHS have unleashed on tens of millions of people living and working here across the US; and now the regime has announced their intent to force disabled people into institutions. From Catherine Rampell at The Bulwark:

Last week the Department of Justice published a memo authorizing states to institutionalize more people with disabilities. This basically means plucking more people out of society and shutting them into nursing homes, psychiatric hospitals, segregated schools, and sheltered workshops, rather than funding community- or home-based care where they have more autonomy.

“This is at its core about the belonging and inclusion of people with disabilities in our communities,” says Alison Barkoff, a health law professor at George Washington University who worked on disability policy under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “This is about moving forward from a very shameful part of our history when we locked people with disabilities away from society.”

Here’s a new story in the Washington Post about the impact yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling giving the regime the ability to end Temporary Protected Status for millions of people living and working here in the US, some for decades: Nursing homes, factory owners and immigrants brace for fallout from Supreme Court ruling:

Immigrants began making plans to sell or rent their homes, secure bank accounts and figure out thorny issues like child custody arrangements. Business owners started calculating how many days they can continue to employ workers whose legal status is set to expire. And nursing home leaders warned they would have fewer beds to offer if health aides are forced to leave the country.

Panic rippled through communities from Florida to Ohio and beyond in the hours after the Supreme Court cleared the Trump administration Thursday to strip humanitarian protections from Haitians and Syrians — and potentially all 1.3 million immigrants from over a dozen countries who had been previously shielded from deportation.

“The residents will be losing caregivers that they really have become attached to,” said Colin O’Leary, executive director at Laurel Ridge Rehabilitation & Skilled Care Center in Boston. Managers at the facility were racing to figure out how much longer staff members from Haiti with temporary protected status could continue taking care of patients. “That’s a lot for our residents to handle.”

Attorneys said Haitians and Syrians could lose work permits in little more than a month, but the deadline remained unclear because lower court judges must issue orders to implement the decision. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters Thursday that Haitians and others with temporary protected status should be detained and deported once they lose the benefit.

“If you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported,” Miller said.

Some of those immigrants have lived in the United States for decades and said they feared being sent back to conflict-ridden homelands that they barely know and whose languages some do not speak.

Note that the immediate reaction from Miller isn’t to find a way to help people peacefully and humanely return to their countries but to arrest them and throw them into ICE hellholes. These are people with jobs, homes, families, kids in school - jail ‘em!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Republicans have created all sorts of stories that they tell themselves about how what they are doing is good for us - rooting out fraud, removing people who weren’t eligible, being fiscally responsible, enforcing the law - to deflect from the misery they are bringing to tens of millions of people in America and many more around the world. For us, we get less and more struggle. For the wealthy they get tax cuts and just more. The morality of all this is galling, beyond the pale, inhumane. It is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for the few and more and more misery for the many. On purpose, by design. Trumpism has replaced a “shining city on a hill” with a “gated community” where all of us are not welcome. It’s “let them cake” on steroids.

In my recent conversations with Colette Delawalla and Charles Gaba I repeated my ongoing astonishment at the collective cruelty of what we are seeing, this new politics of misery as I am calling it today. But we are now getting hard data on what Trump’s cuts to benefit programs have brought:

• 5 million have already lost health coverage, with that number to expected to rise to close to 20m in coming years. Additionally Charles Gaba estimates that the tens of millions who still have ACA coverage have seen their costs rise by $1,500 per person this year.

• 4.3 million have already lost SNAP benefits, and the tens of millions who still have SNAP are getting fewer benefits. The regime brags about kicking these 4 million off the rolls daily.

• USAID cuts are projected to cause somewhere between 500K–1M deaths annually, with 9–14 million projected through 2030 in peer-reviewed modeling. Yes, our government, and Elon Musk, knowingly have sent over 10M of the poorest people in the world to their death. It is genocide of another sort.

Due to Trump and this new politics of misery measles and screw worm have returned to the US, and we are now seeing what may be the worst Ebola outbreak in modern history. In his wars in Venezuela and Iran Trump did nothing - nothing - to promote meaningful reform from two of the more repressive governments in the world. He just doesn’t give a shit about anybody.

As we work to undo the damage Trump has done in the coming years we are going to have to come up for words to describe all this. Fascism, eugenics, white supremacy, Trumpism all seem inadequate. Here’s the Preamble to our Constitution, something that Trumpism and this new politics of misery has clearly abandoned:

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

There is urgency now in our family to create a narrative around all this, something comprehensive, that speaks to our vision and values, and theirs. Jon Ossoff and James Talarico are talking about the moral rot of this Trump era. The brave people of Minnesota rallied for their neighbors. Perhaps this “new politics of virtue” I’ve been describing of late is an early stage effort to find our voice on these matters. But what we are talking about here is about far more than “costs, care, and corruption,” the current slogan being promoted by some in our family. What we are talking about here is so much bigger than that, and something we have to work together to forge in the months and years ahead…..

Thanks for letting me riff here a bit, to air this out in an early sketch form……

And yes, now, my friends, the next big fundraising deadline is Tuesday night and….

It’s Time Get To Work!!!!!

Some Things To Call Congress About This Week

• Yes to making American oligarchs pay for Trump’s failed Iran war - not every day Americans

• Yes to the Ukraine Support Act, get it passed through the Senate and to the President’s desk

• No to the ballroom, the Arch, the gilded statues, the slush fund, the corruption, self-enrichment……

• hell no to Todd Blanche as Attorney General, and yes to very tough questioning of the new DNI nominee, Jay Clayton

• Hell hell no to the new OMB regs that will destroy government-funded science in America. Join the new Stand Up For Science campaign to Stop Vought. Save Science today.

Help Make Hopium Stronger, Bigger, Better

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Winning The Midterms, Competing In Red States and Red Places, Expanding The Map

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Supporting Battleground Candidates For The House and Senate

Hopium’s Winning The House Campaign - $798,100 raised, $1,000,000 goal (new ambitious, audacious even, q2 goal) - Donate to all twelve of our endorsed House challengers with a single contribution split twelve ways | Get to know Jamie Ager (NC-11), Christina Bohannan (IA-01), Paige Cognetti (PA-08), Rebecca Cooke (WI-03), Elaine Luria (VA-02), Sean McCann (MI-04), Jo Mendoza (AZ-06), Chaz Molder (TN-05), Jonathan Nez (AZ-02), Janelle Stelson (PA-10), Shannon Taylor (VA-01), and Sarah Trone Garriott (IA-03) by watching our recently recorded Hopium interviews.

Friends if these twelve win, the House will flip, no matter redistricting madness the Rs execute in the coming days. So eyes on the prize here everyone!

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A donation to the Second Wave Fund is split evenly among these seven, and more as other worthy candidates emerge from their primaries. Our total above includes money we’ve raised for directly for each candidate. You can watch interviews with all of seven of these intrepid leaders here. We are off to a great start here everyone!

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Expanding The Map - Investing And Winning In Key Expansion States

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Keep working hard everyone. We have a country to save, and elections all across this great country to win, together! - Simon