Friday, October 31, 2025
■ Today's Top News
IT'S THE CONSTITUTION, STUPID!
JUST RUSSELL VOUGHT SEEING WHAT HE CAN GET AWAY WITH!
"Trump’s attempt to impose a documentary proof of citizenship requirement on the federal voter registration form is an unconstitutional power grab," said one plaintiff in the case.
By Brett Wilkins
A federal judge on Friday permanently blocked part of President Donald Trump’s executive order requiring proof of US citizenship on federal voter registration forms, a ruling hailed by one plaintiff in the case as “a clear victory for our democracy.”
Siding with Democratic and civil liberties groups that sued the administration over Trump’s March edict mandating a US passport, REAL ID-compliant document, military identification, or similar proof in order to register to vote in federal elections, Senior US District Judge for the District of Columbia Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found the directive to be an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers.
“Because our Constitution assigns responsibility for election regulation to the states and to Congress, this court holds that the president lacks the authority to direct such changes,” Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, wrote in her 81-page ruling.
“The Constitution addresses two types of power over federal elections: First, the power to determine who is qualified to vote, and second, the power to regulate federal election procedures,” she continued. “In both spheres, the Constitution vests authority first in the states. In matters of election procedures, the Constitution assigns Congress the power to preempt State regulations.”
“By contrast,” Kollar-Kotelly added, “the Constitution assigns no direct role to the president in either domain.”
This is the second time Kollar-Kotelly has ruled against Trump’s proof-of-citizenship order. In April, she issued a temporary injunction blocking key portions of the directive.
“The president doesn’t have the authority to change election procedures just because he wants to.”
“The court upheld what we’ve long known: The president doesn’t have the authority to change election procedures just because he wants to,” the ACLU said on social media.
Sophia Lin Lakin of the ACLU, a plaintiff in the case, welcomed the decision as “a clear victory for our democracy.”
“President Trump’s attempt to impose a documentary proof of citizenship requirement on the federal voter registration form is an unconstitutional power grab,” she added.
Campaign Legal Center president Trevor Potter said in a statement: “This federal court ruling reaffirms that no president has the authority to control our election systems and processes. The Constitution gives the states and Congress—not the president—the responsibility and authority to regulate our elections.”
“We are glad that this core principle of separation of powers has been upheld and celebrate this decision, which will ensure that the president cannot singlehandedly impose barriers on voter registration that would prevent millions of Americans from making their voices heard in our elections,” Potter added.
Two federal courts ruled Friday that the White House must release contingency food assistance funds, but officials have suggested they will not comply with the orders.
By Julia Conley
Though two federal judges ruled on Friday that the Trump administration must use contingency funds to continue providing food assistance that 42 million Americans rely on, White House officials have signaled they won’t comply with the court orders even as advocates warn the lapse in nutrition aid funding will cause an unprecedented child hunger crisis that families are unprepared to withstand.
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is planning to freeze payments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program on Saturday as the government shutdown reaches the one-month mark, claiming it can no longer fund SNAP and cannot tap $5 billion in contingency funds that would allow recipients to collect at least partial benefits in November.
President Donald Trump said Thursday that his administration is “going to get it done,” regarding the funding of SNAP, but offered no details on his plans to keep the nation’s largest anti-hunger program funded, and his agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, would not commit on Friday to release the funds if ordered to do so.
“We’re looking at all the options,” Rollins told CNN before federal judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island ordered the administration to fund the program.
The White House and Republicans in Congress have claimed the only way to fund SNAP is for Democratic lawmakers to vote for a continuing resolution proposed by the GOP to keep government funding at current levels; Democrats have refused to sign on to the resolution because it would allow healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act to expire.
The administration previously said it would use the SNAP contingency funds before reversing course last week. A document detailing the contingency plan disappeared from the USDA’s website this week. The White House’s claims prompted two lawsuits filed by Democrat-led states and cities as well as nonprofit groups that demanded the funding be released.
On Thursday evening, US Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) addressed her followers on the social media platform X about the impending hunger emergency, emphasizing that the loss of SNAP benefits for 42 million Americans—39% of whom are children—is compounding a child poverty crisis that has grown since 2021 due to Republicans’ refusal to extend pandemic-era programs like the enhanced child tax credit.
“One in eight kids in America lives in poverty in 2024,” said Jayapal. “Sixty-one percent of these kids—that’s about 6 million kids— have at least one parent who is employed. So it’s not that people are not working, they’re working, but they’re not earning enough.”
“I just want to be really clear that it is a policy choice to have people who are hungry, to have people who are poor,” she said.
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, an economist at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post that the loss of benefits for millions of children, elderly, and disabled people all at once is “unprecedented.”
“We’ve never seen the elderly and children removed from the program in this sort of way,” Schanzenbach told the Post. “It really is hard to predict something of this magnitude.”
A Thursday report by the economic justice group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) emphasized that the impending child hunger crisis comes four months after Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which slashed food assistance by shifting some of the cost of SNAP to the states from the federal government, expanding work requirements, and ending adjustments to benefits to keep pace with food inflation.
Meanwhile, the law is projected to increase the incomes of the wealthiest 20% of US households by 3.7% while reducing the incomes of the poorest 20% of Americans by an average of 3.8%.
Now, said ATF, “they’re gonna let hard-working Americans go hungry so billionaires can get richer.”
At Time on Thursday, Stephanie Land, author of Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education, wrote that “the cruelty is the point” of the Trump administration’s refusal to ensure the 61-year-old program, established by Democratic former President Lyndon B. Johnson, doesn’t lapse for the first time in its history.
“Once, when we lost most of our food stamp benefit, I mentally catalogued every can and box of food in the cupboards, and how long the milk we had would last,” wrote Land. “They’d kicked me, the mother of a recently-turned 6-year-old, off of food stamps because I didn’t meet the work requirement of 20 hours a week. I hadn’t known that my daughter’s age had qualified me to not have to meet that requirement, and without warning, the funds I carefully budgeted for food were gone.”
“It didn’t matter that I was a full-time student and worked 10-15 hours a week,” she continued. “This letter from my local government office said it wasn’t sufficient to meet their stamp of approval. In their opinion, I wasn’t working enough to deserve to eat. My value, my dignity as a human being, was completely dependent on my ability to work, as if nothing else about me awarded me the ability to feel satiated by food.”
“Whether the current administration decides to continue to fund SNAP in November or not, the intended damage has already been done. The fear of losing means for food, shelter, and healthcare is the point,” Land added. “Programs referred to as a ‘safety net’ are anything but when they can be removed with a thoughtless, vague message, or scribble from a permanent marker. It’s about control to gain compliance, and our most vulnerable populations will struggle to keep up.”
On Thursday, the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) expressed hope that the president’s recent statement saying the White House will ensure people obtain their benefits will “trigger the administration to use its authority and precedent to prevent disruptions in food assistance.”
“The issue at hand is not political. It is about ensuring that parents can put food on the table, older adults on fixed incomes can meet their nutritional needs, and children continue to receive the meals they rely on. SNAP is one of the most effective tools for reducing hunger and supporting local economies,” said the group.
“Swift and transparent action is needed,” FRAC added, “to restore stability, maintain public confidence, and ensure that our state partners, local economies and grocers, and the millions of children, older adults, people with disabilities, and veterans who participate in SNAP are not left bearing the consequences of federal inaction.”
"Our message for ICE is simple: Get the hell out," said Evanston, Illinois Mayor Daniel Biss.
By Brad Reed
Officials in Evanston, Illinois are accusing federal immigration officials of “deliberately causing chaos” in their city during a Friday operation that led to angry protests from local residents.
As reported by Fox 32 Chicago, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss and other local leaders held a news conference on Friday afternoon to denounce actions earlier in the day by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials.
“Our message for ICE is simple: Get the hell out of Evanston,” Biss said during the conference.
In a social media post ahead of the press conference, Biss, who is currently a candidate for US Senate, described the agents’ actions as “monstrous” and vowed that he would “continue to track the movement of federal agents in and around Evanston and ensure that the Evanston Police Department is responding in the appropriate fashion.”
As of this writing, it is unclear how the incident involving the immigration officials in Evanston began, although witness Jose Marin told local publication Evanston Now that agents on Friday morning had deliberately caused a car crash in the area near the Chute Elementary School, and then proceeded to detain the vehicle’s passengers.
Videos taken after the crash posted by Chicago Tribune investigative reporter Gregory Royal Pratt and by Evanston Now reporter Matthew Eadie show several people in the area angrily confronting law enforcement officials as they were in the process of detaining the passengers.
The operation in Evanston came on the same day that Bellingcat published a report documenting what has been described as “a pattern of extreme brutality” being carried out by immigration enforcement officials in Illinois.
Specifically, the publication examined social media videos of immigration enforcement actions taken between October 9 to October 27, and found “multiple examples of force and riot control weapons being used” in apparent violation of a judge’s temporary restraining order that banned such weapons except in cases where federal officers are in immediate danger.
“In total, we found seven [instances] that appeared to show the use of riot control weapons when there was seemingly no apparent immediate threat by protesters and no audible warnings given,” Bellingcat reported. “Nineteen showed use of force, such as tackling people to the ground when they were not visibly resisting. Another seven showed agents ordering or threatening people to leave public places. Some of the events identified showed incidents that appeared to fall into more than one of these categories.”
US Rep. Ro Khanna on Friday demanded urgent congressional action to avert “another endless, regime-change war” amid reports that President Donald Trump is weighing military strikes inside Venezuela.
Such strikes, warned Khanna (D-Calif.), would be “blatantly unconstitutional.”
“The United States Congress must speak up and stop this,” Khanna said in a video posted to social media. “No president, according to the Constitution, has the authority to strike another country without Congress’ approval. And the American people have voted against regime change and endless wars.”
Watch:
Khanna’s remarks came in response to reporting by the Miami Herald and the Wall Street Journal on internal Trump administration discussions regarding possible airstrike targets inside Venezuela.
The Herald reported early Friday that the administration “has made the decision to attack military installations inside Venezuela and the strikes could come at any moment.” The Journal, in a story published Thursday, was more reserved, reporting that the administration “has identified targets in Venezuela that include military facilities used to smuggle drugs,” but adding that “the president hasn’t made a final decision on ordering land strikes.”
Citing unnamed US officials familiar with the matter, the Journal reported that “the targets would send a clear message to Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro that it is time to step down.”
Following the reports, the White House denied that Trump has finalized plans for a military strike on Venezuela. Trump himself told reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday that he has not made a final decision, signaling his belief he has the authority to do so if he chooses.
Last week, the president said publicly that land strikes are “going to be next” following his illegal, deadly strikes on boats in waters off Central and South America.
Trump has said he would not seek approval from Congress before attacking Venezuela directly.
“The American people oppose being dragged into yet another endless war, this time in Venezuela, and our constitutional order demands deliberation by the U.S. Congress—period.”
A potentially imminent, unauthorized US attack on Venezuela and the administration’s accelerating military buildup in the Caribbean have thus far drawn vocal opposition from just a fraction of the lawmakers on Capitol Hill, currently embroiled in a shutdown fight.
Just three senators—Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—are listed as official backers of a resolution aimed at preventing Trump from attacking Venezuela without congressional authorization. Other senators, including Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), have spoken out against Trump’s belligerence toward Venezuela.
“Trump is illegally threatening war with Venezuela—after killing more than 50 people in unauthorized strikes at sea,” Sanders wrote in a social media post on Friday. “The Constitution is clear: Only Congress can declare war. Congress must defend the law and end Trump’s militarism.”
Dylan Williams, vice president of government affairs at the Center for International Policy, wrote Friday that “most Americans oppose overthrowing Venezuela’s leaders by force—and an even larger majority oppose invading.”
“Call your senators and tell them to vote for S.J.Res.90 to block Trump’s unauthorized use of military force,” Williams added. “The Capitol switchboard can connect you to your senators’ offices at 202-224-3121.”
A similar resolution led by Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) in the US House has just over 30 cosponsors.
Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.) announced his support for the House resolution on Thursday, saying in a statement that “Trump does not have the legal authority to launch military strikes inside Venezuela without a specific authorization by Congress.”
“I am deeply troubled by reports that suggest this administration believes otherwise,” said Neguse. “Any unilateral directive to send Americans into war is not only reckless, but illegal and an affront to the House of Representatives’ powers under Article I of our Constitution.”
“The American people oppose being dragged into yet another endless war, this time in Venezuela, and our constitutional order demands deliberation by the U.S. Congress—period,” Neguse added.
“Our tax dollars are being weaponized against us,” said the head of the Center for International Policy.
By Stephen Prager
State and local governments have spent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars helping cops wage “war” against their own residents under a secretive and opaque program that allows the police to purchase discounted military-style equipment from the federal government.
Over the past three decades, the obscure 1122 Program has let states and cities equip local cops with everything from armored vehicles to military grade rifles to video surveillance tech, according to a report published Thursday by Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, part of the Center for International Policy.
Using open records requests, which were necessary due to the lack of any standardized auditing or record-keeping system for the program, the group obtained over $126 million worth of purchasing data across 13 states, four cities, and two counties since the program’s creation in 1994. Based on these figures, they projected the total spending across all 50 states was likely in the “upper hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“The 1122 Program diverts public money from essential community needs and public goods into military-style equipment for local police,” said Rosie Khan, the co-founder of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency. “The $126.87 million spent on militarized police equipment and surveillance technology could have instead provided housing support for 10,000+ people for a year, supplied 43 million school meals, or repaired roads and bridges in dozens of communities.”
Congress created the 1122 Program at the height of the War on Drugs, authorizing it under the 1994 National Defense Authorization Act to provide police departments with equipment to carry out counter-drug operations. It was not the first program of its kind, but followed in the footsteps of the more widely known 1033 Program, which has funneled over $7 billion of excess military equipment to police departments.
The long backlog and a reporting protocol developed especially for Israel are likely to keep Israeli forces from being held accountable, said officials.
By Julia Conley
Progressive lawmakers and rights groups have long warned that by arming the Israel Defense Forces and providing the IDF with more than $21 billion, the US has violated its own laws barring the government from sending military aid to countries accused of human rights abuses and of blocking humanitarian relief.
On Thursday, a classified report by the US State Department detailed for the first time the federal government’s own acknowledgment of the scale of alleged human rights abuses that the IDF has committed in Gaza since it began bombarding the exclave in October 2023.
The Office of the Inspector General’s document, reported on by the Washington Post, which spoke to US officials about it, also detailed how allegations of human rights abuses against the Israeli military are made harder to prove by a vetting process that is only afforded to Israel—not other countries accused of violations.
The US officials said the long backlog of “many hundreds” of possible violations of the Leahy Laws, which bar US military assistance from going to units credibly accused of human rights abuses, would likely take years to review—calling into question whether the IDF will ever be held accountable for them.
“The lesson here is that if you commit genocide and war crimes, do as much as possible because then it becomes difficult to investigate everything,” said journalist and Northwestern University professor Marc Owen Jones grimly in response to the Post‘s report.
The government report was described by the Post days after the State Department dismantled a website used to report human rights violations by foreign militaries that receive US aid, which was established in 2022 to ensure the US was in compliance with the Leahy Laws.
The Biden administration flagged at least two 2024 attacks by Israeli forces—one that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers and one known as the “flour massacre,” in which more than 100 Palestinians were killed and nearly 800 were injured as they tried to get flour from aid trucks—as ones that may have used US weapons, signaling that continuing US aid to Israel would break the Leahy Laws.
“To date, the US has not withheld any assistance to any Israeli unit despite clear evidence.”
A report by Amnesty International last year focused on several IDF attacks on civilian infrastructure—which killed nearly 100 people including 42 children—in which Israel used bombs and other weapons made by US companies such as Boeing.
But just a week after the Amnesty analysis, the Biden administration told Congress in a mandated report that it was “not able to reach definitive conclusions” on whether Israel had used US-supplied weapons in attacks such as the one on the World Central Kitchen workers.
After the report of the new analysis, said University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami, former President Joe Biden and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken “cannot hide from responsibility” after they persistently defended and funded Israel’s attacks on Gaza.
But along with the long backlog of potential human rights abuses, the so-called Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, which dates back to 2020, is likely to prevent the State Department from reviewing the allegations against the IDF.
The government’s protocol for reviewing allegations against Israel differs from that of other countries; a US working group is required to “come to a consensus on whether a gross violation of human rights has occurred,” with representatives of the US Embassy in Jerusalem among those who participate in the working group.
“To date, the US has not withheld any assistance to any Israeli unit despite clear evidence,” Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in the early weeks of Israel’s war on Gaza over the Biden administration’s military support, told the Post.
Shahed Ghoreishi, a former State Department communications official who was fired earlier this year after pushing for the agency to condemn ethnic cleansing and other abuses in Gaza, said it was “predictable” that the State Department declined to answer questions from the Post about the inspector general’s report.
“There may be nothing that can excuse the brushing of crimes under the rug,” said Ghoreishi, “but ducking questions and hoping it goes away (including no more State Department press briefings) is an abdication of responsibility to the American people.”
The inspector general’s report was compiled days before Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire agreement earlier this month; the deal is still formally in place, but Israel has continued carrying out strikes, killing more than 800 Palestinians since it was signed.
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