DL Open Thread: Saturday, November 8, 2025
Court To Trump: ‘No Troops For You’:
President Donald Trump was permanently blocked from sending the National Guard to Portland by U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut, who delivered her final order in the case Friday.
The case has centered around whether ongoing protests outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in the city warrant a National Guard deployment. In her ruling, she acknowledged “violent protests did occur,” but law enforcement was able to address them.
“Since that brief span of a few days in June, the protests outside the Portland ICE facility have been predominately peaceful, with only isolated and sporadic instances of relatively low-level violence, largely between protesters and counter-protesters,” the judge wrote in her 106-page order, “this Court concludes that even giving great deference to the President’s determination, the President did not have a lawful basis to federalize the National Guard.”
The permanent injunction went into effect immediately.
Judge Immergut is a Trump appointee. He can’t get rid of her. Sad.
No Food For The Hungry. Tax Giveaways To The Wealthy:
With little public scrutiny, the Trump administration is handing out hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts to some of the country’s most profitable companies and wealthiest investors.
The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, through a series of new notices and proposed regulations, are giving breaks to giant private equity firms, crypto companies, foreign real estate investors, insurance providers and a variety of multinational corporations.
The primary target: The administration is rapidly gutting a 2022 law intended to ensure that a sliver of the country’s most profitable corporations pay at least some federal income tax. The provision, the corporate alternative minimum tax, was passed by Democrats and signed into law by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. It sought to stop corporations like Microsoft, Amazon and Johnson & Johnson from being able to report big profits to shareholders yet low tax liabilities to the federal government. It was projected to raise $222 billion over a decade.
But the succession of notices the Treasury and I.R.S. have issued beginning this summer means the tax could bring in a fraction of that.
These breaks come in addition to the roughly $4 trillion package of tax cuts that President Trump signed into law in July. The legislation, passed entirely by Republicans, heavily benefits businesses and the ultrawealthy. It is projected to add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit and came with steep cuts to health care for the elderly and food stamps for the poorest Americans.
With its various tax relief provisions, the administration is now effectively adding hundreds of billions of dollars in new breaks for big businesses and investors. The Treasury is empowered to write rules to help the I.R.S. carry out tax laws passed by Congress. But the aggressive actions of the Trump administration raise questions about whether it is exceeding its legal authority.
Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have attacked federal workers as instruments of the “deep state,” exercising power beyond anything authorized by the law. Now the administration is doing the same thing, several tax experts said, undermining laws that hit the ultrawealthy and big companies.
Uh, Democrats, gonna say anything?
Good Move, Bad Move? We’re talking Schumer’s proposal to end the stand-off:
…Senate Democrats have offered to vote for a continuing resolution in exchange for a one-year extension of Obama subsidies and creating some kind of bipartisan kumbaya health-care negotiating group. There appears to be other budgetary stuff in there. It’s not clear to me whether there’s anything on rescissions. But the topline is the headline. Shutdown ends in exchange for a one-year extension of the Obamacare funding. I had heard that Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s answer was no.
When I first heard this news it sounded like a pretty weak position for the Democrats, sort of the most minimal concrete ask possible. But when I thought about it a bit more, I decided that wasn’t quite right. People get immediate relief after more than a month of headlines about Democrats demanding the relief. And a one-year extension places a new health care coverage cliff precisely in the days just before and after Election Day for the 2026 midterms, which puts this critical issue at the center of next year’s campaign. If a more permanent restoration isn’t agreed to before Election Day people will start getting notices about big premium hikes right about a week before Election Day. In electoral terms, I definitely get the logic.
I would further push for undoing the new round of shutdown layoffs and killing the big infrastructure and energy projects in Blue states. I don’t know if that’s included. I’d demand several more things. But on the big picture item I see the logic of this.
OK. The Rethugs said no. The Democrats need to blast that message far and wide. Will they? We’ll see.
Those Poor White Farmers. More idiocy:
Donald Trump said Friday that no US government officials would be attending the Group of 20 summit this year in South Africa, citing the country’s treatment of white farmers.
The US president had already announced he would not attend the annual summit for heads of state from the globe’s leading and emerging economies. JD Vance had been scheduled to attend in Trump’s place, but a person familiar with Vance’s plans who was granted anonymity to talk about his schedule said Vance would no longer travel there for the summit.
“It is a total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa,” Trump said on his social media site. In his post, Trump cited “abuses” of Afrikaners, including violence and death as well as confiscation of their land and farms.
A policy that appeals only to racists. Ain’t enough racists to save the Rethugs in 2026.
What do you want to talk about?
