I save the best for first. So, you all should know that Josh Johnson is hosting The Daily Show Tuesday night, along with Wed. and Thurs. nights.Thank you for your attention to this vital matter!
Next, and almost as good: maybe this has been seen, but here it is, for your enjoyment.
On Monday, March 23, 2026, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Watson v. Republican National Committee. It’s one of, if not the most important, cases in front of the Court this term.
Conservatives have long maintained that federal laws that refer to an election “day” trump state laws that permit mail-in ballots to count, even if they are received later, so long as they are postmarked by election day. They rely on provisions like 2 U.S.C. § 7 that provide that “The Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election, in each of the States and Territories of the United States.” Mississippi is one of the states that allows ballots cast and postmarked by election day but received by election officials shortly thereafter to count.
Mississippi is, oddly enough, defending its law, which allows a five-day grace period for ballots to arrive, against the attack from the Republican Party. The district court ruled in the state’s favor, holding that the election “day” established by Congress was intended to prevent elections from spanning several days, which would be cumbersome to administer and could result in undue influence from early results. The Judge held that allowing time for the Post Office to deliver ballots postmarked by Election Day does not implicate those concerns.
The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed. They held that Congress established an election “day,” and all ballots must be cast and received then. They relied on the Constitution’s Elections Clause, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1.It reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” The appellate court reasoned that a ballot is “cast” when the state “takes custody of it.” Five judges dissented from the en banc decision.
In defending its position, the state argues that federal law only requires that voters cast their ballots by Election Day; it does not require that election officials receive them that same day. The National Council for State Legislatures, a nonpartisan organization, reports that “Mississippi is one of 16 states, plus Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Washington, D.C., that currently accept and count mailed ballots from any voter received after Election Day but postmarked on or before (sometimes only before) Election Day.” In addition, 29 states, including Mississippi, accept ballots from military and overseas voters sent before or on Election Day but received after, under certain circumstances.” Members of the military who are stationed away from their homes are among those whose ballots take advantage of the safe harbor.
Then on Tuesday, the Court takes up Noem v. Al Otro Lado, where the issue is whether the government can systematically turn back asylum seekers before they arrive at the border and make their asylum requests. Immigrants can request asylum when they arrive at or are physically present in the U.S. That request triggers asylum proceedings. In 2017, the Trump administration began using CBP officers to turn away immigrants who did not have valid travel documents before they reached the border and could apply for asylum.
When the case made its way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the court rejected the government’s efforts to circumvent asylum proceedings. The three-judge panel held that people who were turned away from entering the country before they could present themselves to apply for asylum had “arrived in” the country once officials, on either side of that border, made contact with them. The full court declined the government’s request to reconsider that decision en banc; there was a 12-judge dissent from that denial of en banc, arguing for 126 pages that U.S. law could not be applied outside of the United States and that “aliens in Mexico” were not in the U.S.
The Solicitor General has asked the Supreme Court to adopt the dissent’s view. He also relies on a case called Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, where the Court ruled 27 years ago that Haitian refugees trying to reach the U.S. were not protected by immigration law when they were intercepted at sea before reaching the U.S. The Court held that the President had the power to deploy the Coast Guard to repatriate “undocumented aliens” intercepted on the high seas.
The case is in an unusual posture because DHS has discontinued “metering,” as the practice of intercepting asylum seekers before they reach the U.S. border with Mexico is called, during the Biden administration. But the Solicitor General is arguing that the government “seeks to retain the option of reviving the practice” if it is needed in the future, a rare move by the Trump administration to ask for permission first. The rule the government is advocating for could lead to desperate scrambles to cross the border in dangerous conditions by people who would otherwise be denied their lawful right to seek asylum. On Tuesday, we’ll learn how many votes there are on the Court to permit that.
Other developments to watch for this week include:
A hearing on Anthropic’s request for a preliminary injunction, in its lawsuit against the Department of Defense’s sudden rejection of the AI company when it drew a red line prohibiting the use of its models for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. We discussed the lawsuit when it was filed.
Following a delay from last week, former Venezuelan president Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are expected in court on Thursday in the Southern District of New York. As we discussed a week ago, prosecutors say Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela and hasn’t been considered by the U.S. to be so for several years, and therefore may not use Venezuelan government monies to fund their defense. Maduro and Flores’ lawyers argue that the laws and traditions of the country permit it.
Friday, federal district Judge J.P. Boulee will hold a hearing in Atlanta in the election records seizure case. We discussed that here last week, when he set the date.
Also on Friday, legal papers are due for Epstein survivors’ proposed settlement with Bank of America. Reuters reports that “Lawyers for both sides are scheduled to submit legal papers about the settlement by March 27, and the judge scheduled a court hearing for April 2 to consider approving the deal.”
Editors Note: The following article is an Op-Ed submitted by Max Freedman. Max Freedman is a journalist covering LGBTQ+ topics, primarily but not entirely politics and music, from Philadelphia, PA.
When transgender runner Sadie Schreiner was allegedly removed from the heat sheet at Princeton University’s May 3, 2025 Larry Ellis Invitational track meet simply for being transgender, she sued the university and accused it of discrimination—and she’s not the only transgender runner taking action. Winter Parts, a well-known transgender running advocate, is organizing a boycott of Princeton’s two spring 2026 track meets, the Sam Howell Invitational on April 4 and the Larry Ellis Invitational on May 1.
“I want to see [the Larry Ellis Invitational organizers] face visible consequences for excluding someone from their meet,” Parts said. “My hope is that a lot of [athletes boycott]. I think it would send a strong financial and visual message to the Princeton officials if they’re going through the effort of trying to put on this meet, and nobody wants to show up because everyone’s upset with how they treated Sadie.” Notably, Parts doesn’t personally know Schreiner—who ran as “unattached” at the 2025 Larry Ellis Invitational, meaning unaffiliated with a running club or university track and field team but eligible to participate based on prior official race times—but was moved to take action nonetheless.
Although excluding transgender runners is, unacceptably and despicably, par for the course these days at professional running events—current NCAA and USA Track & Field policies ban transgender women from competing with other women—the two Princeton track meets aren’t professional events, making their alleged transgender exclusion an alarming escalation. Just as potentially concerning is that, whereas both track meets have previously been open to unattached runners and runners from clubs, Parts said that a coach from a prominent running club told them that, for the 2026 meets, only runners on university track and field teams are eligible to participate. It is unclear if or how this newly restricted eligibility is related to Schreiner’s pending litigation against Princeton athletic director John Mack and Princeton director of track operations Kimberly Keenan-Kirkpatrick. Mack, Keenan-Kirkpatrick, and a representative for the third defendant in Schreiner’s lawsuit, Leone Timing & Results Services, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and Schreiner was unable to comment due to her litigation.
Parts has emailed the track and field coaching staff at just under three dozen prominent colleges and universities, including Rutgers University, Temple University, and Columbia University, to demand that they and their runners boycott the 2026 meets. They have also contacted Mack and Keenan-Kirkpatrick to inform them of the boycotts, and some of their friends have joined their boycotting efforts and contacted their alma maters to encourage non-participation.
Avery Prizzi, a non-binary runner who has encouraged eligible runners not to attend the events, said that it feels like an escalation of transphobic rhetoric that a mere track meet, rather than a professional race, has excluded transgender runners. “[The events are] an experience [where] there’s no qualification, there’s no prizes, no first-place trophy,” Prizzi said. “People go to run fast and get a time for themselves. It’s all post-collegiate stuff. There’s no incentive besides running fast. To know that [the event organizers are] just gonna be garbage toward what, effectively, is just a place for people to go and better themselves or race a clock seems completely pointless or outside the mission I figured they were touting.”
Non-binary runner Will Vedder said that “the whole issue that’s been raised on a national level around trans inclusion or exclusion in sports is this, pun intended, trumped-up issue.” Vedder is a 2025-2026 board member of Philadelphia Runner Track Club (PRTC), and although PRTC members are ineligible to participate and the organization does not endorse boycotts, Vedder has told people about the boycotts to nevertheless support transgender runners, saying that excluding transgender people from sports is “based on misinformation. As we know, trans women don’t have any advantage over cis women when it comes to competitiveness in sports. Studies have shown that again and again. The fact that people are acting against what science says and excluding people who just want to run and compete, it’s infuriating.”
A 2023 Frontiers in Sports and Active Livingstudyacknowledges a lack of evidence that transgender athletes are superior in performance and concludes, “Individuals should not have to make a choice between being their authentic selves or being athletes.” Only one transgender person, Quinn—a non-binary Canadian soccer player who uses a mononym in place of a traditional first and last name—has won a gold medal at the Olympics. Additionally, some transgender women runners, including Schreiner herself, have noticed that their performance permanently decreases after starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT). As made clear by the lack of scientific evidence about transgender runners’ supposed athletic advantages, transgender participation in not just running but all sports harms absolutely nobody. It’s the exclusion of transgender athletes that causes harm, and the consequences of this maltreatment reach far beyond the field.
“In the context of the things going on with trans people,” Parts said, “small actions like kicking a trans person out of a track meet build up to the general public thinking lowly of trans people, thinking it’s okay for laws to be passed affecting our lives, demonizing us, trying to eventually result in us being jailed or killed. Trying to push back against that will, hopefully, help increase acceptance of trans people in the public eye.” And with that, the chances of anti-transgender laws being passed — or even proposed — could decrease. A boycott might feel small, but it could help reverse the tides in a big way, and if you know runners on college and university track and field teams, you too can demand that they not participate in the 2026 Sam Howell and Larry Ellis Invitationals.
The sexual abuse allegations against Chavez have rocked them. But their focus is still on protecting other women.
This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana, Shefali Luthra and Marissa Martinez of The 19th. Meet Chabeli, Shefali and Marissa and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Monica Ramirez has spent much of her life spotlighting the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women farmworkers. She, like many in that movement, considered civil rights leader Cesar Chavez an icon.
Since allegations came to light this week that Chavez sexually assaulted women and girls as young as 12 — including fellow movement leader Dolores Huerta — Ramirez and the larger farmworker community have been left reeling. Now, they’re trying to reconcile how this man who so many revered — whose name is on streets, schools and even a holiday — could perpetrate the violence that has plagued women farmworkers for decades.
The community has been “shaken to its foundation,” said Ramirez, the founder of Justice for Migrant Women, a civil rights organization focusing on farmworker and migrant women. She and other leaders are now trying to push forward the farmworker movement and continue the work that many women — not just Chavez — spearheaded.
Monica Ramirez, founder of Justice for Migrant Women, said the farmworker community has been “shaken to its foundation” by the allegations against Cesar Chavez. (Courtesy of Monica Ramirez)
“The farmworker movement is a leaderful movement, and women have always been part of that leadership,” Ramirez said. But their work has often been made invisible, sometimes by the very men who stood beside them in building worker power for Latinx people in the United States.
“In order to have a movement, in order to have a boycott, in order to organize any kind of action, it’s often women who are helping to organize the meetings, helping to bring their compañeras,” Ramirez said.
Chavez was one of the most revered figures in the Latinx civil rights movement. The labor leader cofounded what became the United Farm Workers union alongside Huerta, and was most known for a series of strikes and protests that grew unionization efforts across California. After Chavez’s death in 1993, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In 2014, former President Barack Obama designated his birthday, March 31, as a federal holiday to celebrate his legacy, which many states had already marked.
Now, many of those celebrations are being canceled or renamed after a bombshell, yearslong investigation published by The New York Times Wednesday found evidence of a pervasive pattern of sexual abuse perpetrated by Chavez. Two women said Chavez sexually abused them for years as girls, when the organizer was in his 40s and had already become a powerful global figure. Ana Murguia said Chavez first assaulted her when she was 13; Debra Rojas was 12.
In the years following the abuse, both suffered from depression, panic attacks and substance abuse.
“I feel like he’s been a shadow over my life,” Rojas told the Times. “I want him to stop following me around. It’s time.”
Huerta, the renowned activist who coined the rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” spoke at length about emotional and physical abuse from her longtime organizing partner — a disclosure she had never made publicly. She told the Times that he raped her in a secluded grape field in 1966, and had pressured her to have sex with him another time during a work trip in 1960. Both encounters resulted in children. Huerta concealed the pregnancies and arranged for the baby girls to be raised by others.
She was shaken upon hearing the allegations from other women, and told the Times she struggles to reconcile the man she knew and the one who assaulted her.
Labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta sits during an interview in San Francisco, Saturday, June 8, 2024. Huerta revealed she was raped by Cesar Chavez and pressured into sex during their years organizing together, disclosures she kept private for decades while building the farmworker movement. (Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/AP)
In a statement released Wednesday, Huerta said she carried her secret for 60 years because “building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.”
She said she spoke up because she learned there were others coming forward.
“The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual. Cesar’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people,” she said. “We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”
Magaly Licolli knew exactly what Huerta was talking about in her statements about Chavez.
Licolli is the co-founder and executive director of Venceremos, an organization advocating for poultry workers in Arkansas, and she’s heard stories about sexual harassment and assault on women for years.
Before she started Venceremos, she was fired from another poultry worker organization after speaking up about multiple accusations of sexual harassment and assault against a well-known organizer.
“Women came forward and accused the organizer of sexually assaulting them or sexually harassing them. When I brought that to the board, they didn’t believe it,” Licolli said. “I had to stand with the women … I cannot do this work pretending I’m doing justice when I’m hiding injustice.”
Licolli felt that echoed this week.
“Women of color, we are not trusted on what we go through. We have to prove with pictures, with testimony, our own stories for our own stories to be validated,” she said. “I’m happy that now it’s something that people are talking about, and I’m happy that people are now reflecting about what is the role of women in the movement and when we have to be silenced toward that kind of injustice to protect the work that we do.”
Magaly Licolli, co-founder of Venceremos, pointed to a pattern in organizing spaces where women who report abuse are doubted, ignored or pushed out. (Courtesy of Magaly Licolli)
A growing share of farmworkers are women, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: about 26.4 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. Most are Latina.
A 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization, found that women farmworkers are often at risk of sexual harassment or assault, with virtually every worker interviewed for the report saying they either had experienced harassment or assault or knew someone who had. Farmworkers work in mixed-gender settings, and they have limited worker protections But women typically lack avenues to report their experiences, the report’s authors wrote, in large part because of immigration status. As of 2022, most farmworkers were immigrants without U.S. citizenship.
“Sexual violence and harassment in the agricultural workplace are fostered by a severe imbalance of power between employers and supervisors and their low-wage, immigrant workers,” the report said.
A 2024 review published in the Journal of Agromedicine suggested that as many as 95 percent of women farmworkers in the United States have experienced workplace sexual harassment.
None of the women in the Times story spoke publicly until recently because of the shame and fear associated with reporting abuse against prominent organizers.
But over the past decade, after the growth of the #MeToo movement and the release of millions of Epstein files that have implicated numerous people in powerful positions, survivors have been more willing to speak up about their experiences.
Ramirez, who also founded the public awareness campaign known as the Bandana Project to raise awareness of sexual violence against farmworker women, said she now expects more women to come forward with their own stories. At an event Wednesday night shortly after the news broke, she said one woman came up to her to tell her how sexual assault was a problem in the fields where she worked as a teenager.
“Now that we understand clearly that this issue of sexual violence is an endemic problem in our society … the question we have to answer is: Knowing that, how serious are we going to get in our commitment to ending the problem?”
California lawmakers already plan to change the name of Cesar Chavez Day on March 31 to “Farmworkers Day,” and efforts are underway to remove his name from landmarks. But the real work to come will be about investing resources and support to improve the culture that has protected perpetrators in organizing spaces over victims.
Rep. Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat who worked in organizing before entering politics, said it was “devastating” that the claims took so long to come out. She said when she became an executive director of a nonprofit at 21, she, too, had faced situations that in hindsight were not appropriate, and left the organization with a responsibility to create safer environments for other young women.
“Oftentimes women, especially women of color, we end up having to hold so many things for the sake of the movement, family, community,” Delia Ramirez told the 19th. “I don’t believe that there is one hero for our movements. Movements are led by a collective, and you can’t create some pedestal for one person, because humans will always fail you.”
Rep. Delia Ramirez said movements are led by a collective and warned against placing any one individual on a pedestal. (Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/AP)
Moving forward, Monica Ramirez said people will be watching how leaders in the farmworker movement respond to the allegations. Do they take a defensive posture or question the veracity of the survivors’ accounts? The revelations about Chavez come at a time when sexual misconduct by powerful men has been in the spotlight, all while the country grapples with a wave of immigration enforcement actions that are targeting Latinx people.
Licolli, the poultry organizer, said she has “never romanticized the immigrant community and the immigrant movement.” Sexual abuse happens in every movement and it doesn’t negate the work that’s been done to secure worker power, she said.
And for the farmworker women who are leading this work, it feels more urgent than ever that they continue leading.
Rosalinda Guillen, a farmworker and organizer in Washington state, leads Community to Community Development, an explicitly feminist and women-led organization — a perspective that she said lends itself to advocating for workers who are also parents, and that she said offers space for women farmworkers to assert their needs.
Guillen never met Chavez but was inspired to devote herself to organizing on behalf of farmworkers after his death. The news has been a “revision of everything that many of us know about the farmworker movement,” she said.
Her organization is removing images of Chavez from its office, Guillen said. “We revisited our values and principles in how we work together, reiterating there is no room for that,” she said, referring to sexual misconduct.
On Wednesday, while staff were still processing the reports, five farmworkers walked in. They had just lost their jobs.
Her staff switched gears, turning to figure out what those workers needed and how they could support them.
“They walked in reminding us this is the focus,” Guillen said. “This is why we’re here: To protect farmworkers.”
I haven’t made a Women’s History Month post in a while; it’s difficult to feel celebratory in the face of what both very bad men and women are doing in our names in the US these days. However, to make up for being remiss in re-recording history, please accept this post about Rose O’Neill. I first learned of her when my grandparents moved to Springfield, MO in 1970, and took us to her small museum at the small, then-non-commercial Shepherd Of The Hills area. (It was great back then!) I knew of Kewpies (I don’t care for the cutesiness, but they are art nonetheless,) but had no idea a woman created them, nor that she did so much art right in the area where we were then living. I began to be a fan, but sort of let it go as I got older. Below will be a PBS documentary that is excellent, and inspired me to make this post for March 21st. There is also some other info. Enjoy, and remember, we all have history, and it doesn’t go away just because someone makes it more difficult to find (yes, that is encouraging myself as well as readers who’ve made it this far!)
Here is a link with a snippet, about the museum now in Walnut Shade, MO. I bet all the things I remember will be there. Maybe I’ll make it over there and try again.It looks far less commercialized than Shepherd of the Hills last time I was there.
Bonniebrook is a historic home and museum located in Walnut Shade, Missouri, just a short drive from Branson. Our museum is dedicated to preserving the life and legacy of artist, writer, and activist Rose O’Neill, best known for her creation of the Kewpie dolls.
Bonniebrook Museum features Rose’s original drawings, paintings, and sculptures, artifacts from the O’Neill home, a large collection of Kewpies and other characters, the O’Neill family cemetery, and much more!
As one of the only art museums and historical homes in the Branson area, Bonniebrook is a must-see destination for those looking for things to do in Branson, Missouri and the surrounding areas. Come visit this well-preserved piece of history!
Mission Statement: Bonniebrook Historical Society (BHS) was founded in 1975. Its purpose is to collect, preserve, and make available for educational and historical purposes artifacts, documents, personal items, and any work or items directly relating to the history and life of Rose O’Neill. In addition, BHS accumulates research, materials that document, authenticate, explain, and provide detailed information about the character, personality, and accomplishments of the talented and generous Rose O’Neill.
Today, I have Zoia Horn in mind especially, but it’s a really busy day in Peace & Justice History, with lots to inspire and motivate us, and most of that is below. (I wish we could put small images side by side, or else that I could figure out WP’s preferred method for that.)
March 16, 1190 The entire Jewish community of York, England, perished while observing Shabbat ha-Gadol, the last sabbath before Passover. Gathered together inside Clifford’s Tower, the keep of York’s medieval castle, for protection from the violent mob outside, many of the Jews took their own lives; others died in the flames they had lit, and those who finally surrendered were massacred and murdered. Clifford’s Tower This occurred just after the beginning of the Third Crusade. “Before attempting to revenge ourselves upon the Moslem unbelievers, let us first revenge ourselves upon the ‘killers of Christ’ living in our midst!”
March 16, 1827 The first newspaper owned and edited by and for African-Americans, Freedom’s Journal, was published in New York City. It appeared the same year slavery was abolished in New York state. two of the early founders of Freedom’s Journal
March 16, 1921 The War Resisters International was founded with sections set up in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. By 1939 there were 54 WRI Sections in 24 countries, including the U.S.. WRI No More War demonstration in Berlin 1922 Their symbol: a broken gun.Their slogan: “The right to refuse to kill.” Their founding statement WRI today
March 16, 1968 U.S. troops in South Vietnam killed 504 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, a pair of hamlets in the coastal lowlands of Quang Ngai Province. The victims were from 247 families, completely eliminating 24 of them, three generations with no survivors. Among the dead were 182 women, 17 of them pregnant, and 173 children, including 56 infants, and 60 older men. Young girls sheltering behind their mother during My Lai Lt. William L. Calley, Jr. commanded the men of Charlie Company, First Battalion, Americal Division, and was the only one tried out of 80 involved in what is called the My Lai Massacre. The Army, including a young Major Colin Powell, at first tried to cover it up and the media resisted reporting it. Some of Calley’s soldiers refused to participate, but only 24-year-old helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson and his crew stopped it by putting themselves between the villagers and the troops pursuing them.Chief My Lai prosecutor William Eckhardt described how Thompson responded to what he found when he put his helicopter down: “[Thompson] put his guns on Americans, said he would shoot them if they shot another Vietnamese, had his people wade in the ditch in gore to their knees, to their hips, took out children, took them to the hospital…flew back [to headquarters], standing in front of people, tears rolling down his cheeks, pounding on the table saying, ‘Notice, notice, notice’…then had the courage to testify time after time after time.” Lt. William L. Calley Some of Calley’s soldiers refused to participate, but only 24-year-old helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson and his crew stopped it by putting themselves between the villagers and the troops pursuing them. Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Hugh Thompson’s story (An archived NYT piece that still wants a sign-in/up) More on My Lai 2015 article by Seymour Hersh who broke the original story:
March 16, 1972 Reference librarian Zoia Horn refused to testify against the Harrisburg Seven who were on trial for an alleged conspiracy to kidnap then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Five of the seven were current or former Catholic priests or nuns. Horn had been implicated by an ex-convict informer placed in the Bucknell University library by the FBI. Reference librarian Zoia Horn Though given immunity from self-incrimination, Zoia objected to the idea that libraries could become places of infiltration and spying. Charged with contempt of court, she was sent to jail for 20 days until a mistrial was declared.
Judith Krug, longtime director of the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, said that Horn was “the first librarian who spent time in jail for a value of our profession.”At the trial she asked to read a statement of explanation, but was led away in handcuffs before she had begun her third sentence: “Your Honor, it is because I respect the function of this court to protect the rights of the individual, that I must refuse to testify. I cannot in my conscience lend myself to this black charade. I love and respect this country too much to see a farce made of the tenets upon which it stands. To me it stands on freedom of thought—but government spying in homes, in libraries and universities inhibits and destroys this freedom. It stands on freedom of association—yet in this case gatherings of friends, picnics and parties have been given sinister implications, and made suspect. It stands on freedom of speech—yet general discussions have been interpreted by the government as advocacies of conspiracies.” Zoia Horn in the California Library Hall of Fame
March 16, 1988 Iraqi forces acting under orders from President Saddam Hussein attacked the Kurdish village of Halabja with a variety of poison gasses including mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun, and VX. About 5,000 non-combatant men, but mostly women and children, died from the chemical weapons.This was part of Saddam’s al-Anfal campaign, a slow genocide of the Kurds in Iraq. About 2000 villages were emptied and leveled as well as a dozen larger towns and cities, tens of thousands were killed. Kurdish father Omar Osman and his infant son, victims of Saddam Hussein’s poison gas attack on Halabja, Kurdistan (Iraq) The Human Rights Watch full report on the al-Anfal Campaign
March 16, 2003 Rachel Corrie, an American college student in Gaza to protest Israeli military and security operations, was killed when run over by a bulldozer while trying to stop Israeli troops from demolishing a Palestinian home. The 23-year-old from Olympia, Washington, was a member of International Solidarity Movement and was the first nonviolent western protester to die in the occupied territories. Remembering Rachel Corrie
March 16, 2003 Over 5000 coordinated candlelight vigils and demonstrations took place, in more than 125 countries, in an eleventh-hour protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
It’s another week full of legal proceedings. And a little politics, too.
Tuesday: Maduro and Flores hearing
The U.S.-ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were captured by U.S. forces on January 3 at their Caracas home. They were arrested pursuant to an indictment federal prosecutors had obtained and taken to the U.S. to face those charges. Both pled guilty and are currently detained pending trial. The superseding indictment can be found here. We discussed it at length here.
There was supposed to be a status conference on the case this Tuesday. But the government wrote the Judge, Alvin Hellerstein in the Southern District of New York, requesting a “brief continuance.” The stated reason was to permit discovery to proceed before the parties returned to court, a reasonable request given the likely amount of evidence the government will be turning over to the defense and the time it takes to review it with defendants who remain in custody.
But the government has been busy on the case already, opposing the defendants’ efforts to use Venezuelan government monies to fund their defense. Prosecutors say Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela and hasn’t been considered by the U.S. to be so for several years. Madura and Flores’ lawyers argue the laws and traditions of the country permit it to fund their defense. A Venezuelan official has said they are prepared to do so.
The defendants argue that their inability to access certain third-party funds to pay for their legal fees violates their Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to due process and effective assistance of counsel. The parties have filed their briefs, and Judge Hellerstein is expected to consider the legal fees dispute during the March 26 hearing.
Tuesday: Illinois Primary
Illinois voters head to the polls Tuesday to choose their Democratic and Republican nominees for the open Senate seat being vacated by Dick Durbin, who is retiring after almost three decades. Two members of the House, Raja Krishnamoorthi and Robin Kelly, have thrown their hats into the ring, leaving their seats up for grabs. Three additional Illinois representatives are retiring: Danny Davis, Jan Schakowsky, and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.
That means the Illinois delegation will look different, possibly younger, heading into 2027, and we will have new names to learn. Kamala Harris won the state with 54.8% of the vote in 2024, and it’s unlikely Democrats will lose any seats. In Kelly’s district, former representative Jesse Jackson Jr, who pled guilty to misusing campaign funds in 2013 and was sentenced to 30 months in prison (he served a little under two years), is trying to make a comeback, but he is one of 10 Democrats running for the seat. Jackson, who represented the district for over 20 years before going to prison, is up by double digits in two polls.
Everyone expects Governor JB Pritzker to handily win reelection. But as a potential 2028 presidential contender, there will be heavy scrutiny of how he handles himself during the campaign and how well he performs and leads the Democratic ticket. So there’s a lot to see here.
Under Illinois law, only poll workers and poll watchers can be at the polls on election day, and other people may not mill around outside as voters go about their business. Nonetheless, there have been concerns that ICE might show up to intimidate people. But DHS’s Assistant Secretary for Election Integrity, Heather Honey, issued a statement in late February, saying “Any suggestion that ICE is going to be present at polling places is simply disinformation.” She committed that there would “be no ICE presence at polling locations” during a call with voting officials from across the country.
That makes sense and I’m inclined to believe it. But only because doing it now would trigger legal challenges that would likely be decided against the administration. If they’re going to do this, we’ll likely see it for the first time when voters go to the polls in November.
Wednesday: Fulton County.
As you may recall from our earlier discussion, Judge J.P. Boulee sent the Justice Department and Fulton County to mediation in the case filed by the latter over the government’s seizure of voting records. Wednesday is the date by which the parties must let the Judge know whether they’ve been able to resolve the matter voluntarily. If mediation failed, it will be up to the Judge to decide whether the records are due to be returned, which they almost certainly are (the government gets to keep copies), but the administration could face some messy, revelatory testimony in court if the County goes into the unusual decision to have a U.S. Attorney from Missouri take over the matter, rather than the local U.S. Attorney.
The Rest of the Mess
Pam Bondi wants to deprive state bar associations of their ability to consider ethics challenges to federal prosecutors’ behavior.
DOJ has posted a proposed new regulation in the Federal Register that would prohibit state bars from proceeding while DOJ is conducting an internal review. Nothing in the rule would preclude DOJ from engaging in endless delay and short-circuiting state investigations.
In practice, state bar associations have routinely deferred to DOJ to conduct internal ethics proceedings before they act against a Justice Department lawyer. But that was under the old rules, where DOJ took ethics seriously. And as a practical matter, state bars, not Pam Bondi or Donald Trump, decide whether to give a specific lawyer a license to practice law in their state, so it’s difficult to see how the government has a legal leg to stand on here. It would be like Donald Trump deciding who can be a barber in Oklahoma or a cosmetologist in Arizona.
There is a 30-day comment period for the proposed regulations that will close on April 6. Comments will be public. Expect a wide variety of members of the legal profession to weigh in against the administration’s transparent effort to prevent state bar action against DOJ officials who are in ethical trouble. Congress made it clear in a law called the McDade Amendment that government attorneys “shall be subject to State laws and rules … governing attorneys in each State where such attorney engages in that attorney’s duties, to the same extent and in the same manner as other attorneys in that State.”The measure was passed in 1998 amid concerns about overzealous prosecutors. Pennsylvania Republican Representative Joseph McDade (R-PA) championed the measure after he was acquitted on bribery and racketeering charges.
The SAVE Act heads to the Senate for a vote this week.
We’ve been talking about it for months. This appears to be the week the Senate will vote on the SAVE Act. It has already passed in the House. In our conversation at Big Tent last week, Marc Elias opined it would not pass. The Senate would have to abandon the filibuster rule to get it across the finish line. That would be a last-ditch measure that Republican Senators have long argued against, but some seemed to waffle on the issue last week.
Trump tried to get Republican Senators to abandon the filibuster last November. He made that pitch with visiting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at his side. Orban heads what he has called an “illiberal democracy” in that country. It was quite an image.
The issue last year was the pending government shutdown. Trump called on Senate Republicans to scrap the filibuster rule and allow simple majority votes to prevail on that issue and for most other legislation. They declined, even though, or perhaps because, Trump promised his party that if they did, the GOP would “never lose the midterms and we will never lose a general election” for the foreseeable future. It will be interesting to see if that pitch reemerges this week as Trump tries to pass a measure designed to suppress Democratic votes in the upcoming election.
Senators on both sides of the aisle have long understood the power that honoring the filibuster gives both sides; it’s a form of mutually assured retention of power. But Texas Senator John Cornyn, long a proponent of the filibuster, put out an op ed in the New York Post arguing that the SAVE America Act is more important than it is.
“For many years, I believed that if the US Senate scrapped the filibuster, Texas and our nation would stand to lose more than we would gain … My fellow conservatives and I have proudly used the 60-vote threshold to protect the country from all sorts of bad ideas and dangerous policies. But when the reality on the ground changes, leaders must take stock and adapt…Today, Democrats are weaponizing the Senate’s rules to block the SAVE America Act, defund the Department of Homeland Security and hurt the American people — all to spite President Donald Trump.”
It was quite a reversal of long-held principles in service of Trump from the Texas Republican, who is facing an uphill battle to hold onto his Senate seat. He faced a primary challenge from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Neither candidate reached the 50% threshold necessary for an outright win, so there will be a runoff, which is scheduled for May 26, although there have been whispers of a voluntary resolution. How we are about to find out if other Republican senators want to hold onto any of their institutional power or are willing to throw it away on Trump and a law that has strong arguments against its constitutionality.
Finally, Julie Le, the former government lawyer in Minneapolis who we met in this piece, when she begged a judge to hold her in contempt so she could get a good night’s sleep, has launched a Congressional campaign website. “This job sucks,” she told the judge. Now, it appears she might be looking for a new one, since she was ultimately removed after her outburst in court.
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