Wednesday, August 20, 2025

No, Chump, you are not going to heaven

Convicted Felon Donald Chump is a liar with dementia.  So you can understand why we all have reason to doubt anything he says.  James Liddell (INDEPENDENT) notes:

While sitting beside Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, Donald Trump once again boasted of ending “six wars” in as many months – without negotiating a single ceasefire.

“If you look at the six deals that I settled this year, they were all at war. I didn't do any ceasefires,” Trump said before turning to Zelensky, adding: “I don’t think you need a ceasefire.”
Since his trip to Scotland last month, Trump has repeated multiple times a version of his claim that he’s ended wars “at about one a month,” according to PolitiFact. Earlier Monday, the president posted on Truth Social that in one case, he had averted a “possible unclear disaster.”

By Tuesday morning, Trump told Fox & Friends that his administration had “solved seven wars,” though the president did not elaborate on which conflict he was now including in his list. The White House told The Independent that Trump was citing conflicts from both his first and second terms.

The White House previously lauded Trump as the “peacemaker-in-chief,” and the president has styled himself as the “president of peace.”

Meanwhile, the commander-in-chief has openly signalled his ambitions of winning a Nobel Peace Prize despite campaigning on a largely non-interventionist platform.

Are Trump’s claims of halting hostilities credible or an embellishment of the truth? The Independent takes a closer look at the president’s peacemaking record.

Use the link to go through each claim but, spoiler alert, Mr. Chump lies.  Big time. Brendan McFadden (IRISH TIMES) reports:

President Donald Trump revealed to Fox News this morning that he's "worried" he won't "make it to heaven" — and hopes his efforts to halt the Russia-Ukraine conflict will help him get there.

The president sat down with Fox and Friends to address his White House discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European officials. During the extensive interview, he outlined his pursuit of "peace deals"

No, Mr. Chump, you are not going to heaven.  You will not there because you have harmed people and wronged people.  You have been credibly accused of sexual assault.  You have attacked children with your cuts to Head Start and Medicaid.  You have demonized immigrants.  I am not sure where you think that these or any other actions warrant your entry into heaven? 

In other news, David McAfee reports:

A new duo is secretly forming, and it could be very dangerous to Donald Trump, according to the president's own former operative.

Former Trump associate Lev Parnas, who says he used to be "deep inside the Trump machine" and now reports from the outside, on Wednesday reported that Elon Musk is teaming up with an unlikely man: Dan Bongino.
Chosen for a top FBI spot by Trump, Bongino has been flagged as someone within the administration who could potentially be a weak link on the matter of disgraced financier and convicted child abuser Jeffrey Epstein.
In an article on Substack called Breaking: Trump Scrambles to Cover Up the Epstein Files as Elon Musk Moves In on Dan Bongino, Parnas reports, "While Trump and Putin distracted the cameras in Alaska, my sources reveal Elon Musk was quietly reaching out to Dan Bongino—testing new alliances that could blow the Epstein files wide open."
He continues:

"My sources are telling me that Elon Musk is quietly, behind the scenes, reaching out to Dan Bongino. Alliances are being formed. And I want to remind you how this whole Epstein thing started—though the media never linked it. It began when Donald Trump had a very public fallout with Elon Musk. Musk went on X and put out a tweet: 'Donald Trump is on the Epstein list.' That tweet was quickly deleted under pressure, but the damage was done."

That would be wonderful if Mr. Musk and Mr. Bongino teamed up on this issue.  We might finally get truth.  Lastly, Shrobana Rakshit (INQUISITR) reports:

The author of a new book that explores Prince Andrew’s connections to the disgraced banker, Andrew Lownie, told RadarOnline.com that “the Epstein connection destroyed Andrew’s public life – and Trump risks the same fate if fresh details emerge.”

In his new book, The Rise and Fall of the House of York, Lownie, 62, spends a whole chapter on Epstein’s political and social entanglements. After resolving a US civil sexual assault lawsuit, the 65-year-old Duke of York, the youngest son of the late Queen Elizabeth, was compelled to give up his royal patronages and military awards in 2022.
Along with renouncing the title His Royal Highness, he completely stopped performing public tasks. Despite a now-famous photo of him with Andrew at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort on February 12, 2000, Trump, 79, has long denied knowing the duke.

Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his s– trafficking fixer, are both shown in the photo with the guests. Asked about their relationship, Lownie said: “Yes, there’s photographic evidence of them together.”



This is C.I.'s "The Snapshot" for today:


Wednesday, August 20, 2025.  Chump continues his war on immigrants while shedding protections for survivors of domestic abuse, hate monger Kim Davis tries to lure the Supreme Court into her lair, Hillary Clinton predicts the Supreme Court will overturn marriage equality, although Zohran  Mamdani has thousands of online supporters it appears none of them can step up and defend him from attacks, the Epstein scandal is not going away and one MSNBC video report on YOUTUBE has collected almost half-a-million views in less than 12 hours, and much more. 


I don't know how much more the nation can take.  I'm serious.  There are stories I ignore here because it's just too much.  Usually, it's a column by someone insisting we've passed the point of no return.  Maybe we have.  Don't know how that observation helps us?  I agree we're at the breaking point.  And I bring that up for a reason.  Erin Keller (INDEPENDENT) reports:

A Massachusetts bookstore is stepping in to help LGBTQ couples tie the knot as the U.S. Supreme Court considers whether to hear a case that could impact same-sex marriage rights.

All She Wrote Books in Somerville, Massachusetts, announced it will host an LGBTQ “wedding marathon” on August 30 from 1 to 5 p.m., under the banner “Love Can’t Wait Another Day.” The event will offer multiple couples the chance to marry “without the cost or delay of a traditional wedding,” according to the shop’s Instagram post.
We can’t believe it’s come to this, but the clock could be ticking on LGBTQIA+ marriage rights,” the bookshop wrote online. “We’re not interested in waiting to see what happens, and neither is our community. That’s why we’re creating space for folks to say ‘I do’ ASAP.”

Owner Christina Pascucci-Ciampa is rolling out in-store packages for the wedding marathon. The $500 package includes a private one-hour ceremony with a Justice of the Peace, professional photos, cupcakes, an optional toast with bubbly, a wedding gift from the store, and guidance on replicating legal documents should the right to equal marriage be overturned.

Couples can bring up to 12 guests to witness their vows, or opt for a more intimate ceremony for just the two of them.

“What matters is making it official while we still can,” Pascucci-Ciampa wrote.

Couples interested in participating are encouraged to reserve their spot in advance and must obtain a marriage license before the event. Information on marriage licenses in Somerville is available through the city’s official resources.

On July 24, former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis filed a petition with the SCOTUS, requesting it to overturn the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

Kim Davis is the noted trash who got butt hurt last week over Sally Field's son Sam calling her exactly what she is.  She's ugly, if you've never seen her.  Looks like she needs a bath. Maybe even to be dipped for ticks and fleas.  Definitely needs to cut that ugly hair.  Looks like no one -- man or woman -- has touched -- or ever would  touch --  her.  She's like the freaky Esmeralda in EDWARD SCISSORHANDS.


2016 Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says she believes the Supreme Court is poised to overturn its landmark ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which effectively legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, and that unmarried same-sex couples “ought to consider” tying the knot. 
“American voters, and to some extent the American media, don’t understand how many years the Republicans have been working in order to get us to this point,” Clinton told Fox News host Jessica Tarlov on Friday in a wide-ranging interview on “Raging Moderates,” the podcast Tarlov co-hosts with Scott Galloway. 

“It took 50 years to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Clinton said. “The Supreme Court will hear a case about gay marriage; my prediction is they will do to gay marriage what they did to abortion — they will send it back to the states.” 

“Anybody in a committed relationship out there in the LGBTQ community, you ought to consider getting married because I don’t think they’ll undo existing marriages, but I fear they will undo the national right,” she said. 

Daniel Villarreal (LGBTQ NATION) notes that some believe Davis' case will not be taken up by the Court this year:

Even if the Supreme Court did take the case, [Chris] Geidner said he didn’t think a case like Davis’ would provide sufficient legal reasoning to overturn same-sex marriage entirely. Rather, he said that a successful religious freedom or free speech challenge to Obergefell would do other “bad things,” like hollow out civil protections or public accommodations for same-sex couples, essentially inconveniencing or endangering LGBTQ+ couples but not outright denying them the right to a marriage license.

Gay legal journalist Joseph Mark Stern agrees somewhat with Geidner’s take. In recent Bluesky posts about Davis’ case, Stern wrote, “Recent panic that the Supreme Court might soon overturn marriage equality is unwarranted—the justices are highly unlikely to take up the case that has people worried. And this freak-out risks diverting attention away from the court’s subtler, ongoing attack on gay rights.”

“At this Supreme Court, the biggest realistic threat to gay rights isn’t outright reversal of Obergefell, but the ongoing abridgment of gay equality in the name of religious liberty and free speech,” Stern added. “The Supreme Court has also weaponized the First Amendment to legalize discrimination against same-sex couples in public accommodations, a project that will expand in the coming years.”

Clinton was correct when she said that, if Obergefell were to be overturned, then the right to same-sex marriage would fall back to the states.

In 2022, then-President Joe Biden signed the Respect for Marriage Act (RMA), a law that repealed the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and required the federal and state governments to recognize same-sex marriages that occur in states where they are legal.

Currently, 25 states have both laws and constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage, five have just statutes banning it, and five others have just constitutional amendments banning it.

If this happened, a battle between pro- and anti-marriage states could emerge. Republican attorneys general and legislatures in states with same-sex marriage bans could argue that they should be exempt from having to recognize same-sex marriages from states where such marriages are legal.


John Roberts can rot in hell if the Court overturns Obergefell.  He will have destroyed the Supreme Court if that happens.  It is under his watch that the Court has fallen among the public.  He is the Chief Justice and he is directly responsible. Gallup:


At 48%, the proportion of Americans who have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the federal government’s judicial branch is statistically similar to the 2022 record low (47%) and 2023 (49%) ratings. Before 2022, trust in the judicial branch had never been below the majority level and typically exceeded 60%.

The 13-point decline in trust that occurred between 2020 and 2021 followed Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court and its decision to allow a strict Texas abortion law to stand. The seven-point drop from 2021 to 2022 came after the court handed down the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade’s finding of constitutional protections for abortion rights.

This is on John Roberts, Chief Justice.  His leadership and his actions have allowed this huge loss of confidence in the institution of the Court to take place.  There's no excuse for it. And it was his job, as Chief Justice, to hector and lecture his peers about precedent and rule of law.  But he didn't.  Like Jonathan Turley, Roberts has turned out to be just another racist hate monger.  

And he is responsible for where we are now.  Instead of working to save the Court, he has destroyed it.

If marriage equality is overturned, the Court's reputation will fall even further and they will have made it clear that they do not stand for equality and fairness but they are an idealogical nightmare that crafts a decision based upon something other than the law.  

Non poli sci people may not understand the importance of this moment in time.  Poli sci-ers should get it.  I predicted here the rise of ISIS in Iraq before it happened.  I warned over and over for months that it was going to happen.  Not because I'm a psychic but because the Iraqi people had a prime minister who shouldn't have been prime minister (he didn't win the election) and bit by bit a system exposed that could nothing to help them.

Right now, Republican nut jobs have control of the House and Senate and the White House.  The only institution possibly standing is the Supreme Court.

Roberts better protect the Court and its image or he's asking for a Civil War in this country.

Any political model will warn that this is where the complete fall of trust in the Supreme Court ends.


Let's turn to a political race.  Roger Anderson (FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM) rushes to whisper a fantasy:

New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has faced heavy criticism for his foreign policy views, which many see as beyond the role of a mayor. He led the Democratic primary, gaining strong support from younger progressive voters. However, Mamdani has encountered opposition from the Indian American community, with critics claiming he has acted as an opportunistic politician.
British political commentator Douglas Murray believes Mamdani is aiming to get into power by promising New Yorkers things that he cannot bring. He argued that Mamdani has failed to address things that New Yorkers need.
Murray stated, “His position as a so-called Democratic socialist, would make sure that New York, which has been suffering for so many years now with a brain drain, talent drain, money train, money drain would simply go down even further.”

How about you leave the fairy tales to Mother Goose, Roger Anderson, you damn liar.

So we know that Zohran is a Democratic Socialist.  That is how you spell it by the way.  Roger couldn't even figure that out.  Who is Douglas Murray?  Roger thinks he's worth listening to.  But he doesn't tell you who he is because Roger knows if he did that . . . no one would listen.  Because no one really cares what a British neoconservative thinks about a politician in NYC.  


This is how they work to defeat Zohran.  They lie.  They lie and if caught might offer an apology.  Jonathan Turley, the fat f**k with the cod liver oil face, decided to lie about Zohran this month.  Called out on his lie, he immediately wanted the world to then know, oops! I confused him with another Muslim!   Mahmoud Khalil!  No one in their right mind would confuse NY Assembly Person Zohran Mamdani with the grad student activist Chump targeted named Mahmoud Khalil.  The names are very different, their backgrounds are very different, their heritage is very different.  Turley tried a cheap shot, got called on it and rushed to pretend it was an error.

Roger Anderson, big fat liar, writes a 452 word piece on Zohran's campaign that relies on one source -- a British neoconservative.  None of the 452 words bothers to note that Zohran is currently riding high in the polls.

AARP noted yesterday:

Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani leads the field in the race for New York City mayor, according to a new poll of registered voters conducted by AARP New York and Gotham Polling& Analytics. In the initial ballot test, Mamdani received 41.8% support, followed by former Governor Andrew Cuomo (23.4%), Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa (16.5%), Mayor Eric Adams (8.8%), and other candidates (1.6%), with 7.9% undecided.

According to the poll, Mamdani secures just over half of Democrats (51.6%), while Cuomo captures nearly a quarter (24%). The rest of the field remains in single digits. Among Republicans, Sliwa gets over half the vote, with Cuomo and Adams splitting much of the remainder.

The poll also explored a unique set of “drop-out” scenarios to assess how the race would shift if one or more candidates were to exit. In every scenario tested, Mamdani maintains a commanding lead over the remaining contenders. Notable shifts included:

  • If Cuomo drops: Mamdani rises to 48.4%, leading Sliwa by 27.6 points.
  • If Adams drops: Mamdani leads Cuomo by 14.0 points (42.6% to 28.6%).
  • If Sliwa drops: Mamdani leads Cuomo by 16.8 points (45.1% to 28.3%).
  • Head-to-head with Sliwa (Cuomo, Adams, Walden drop): Mamdani leads by 22.9 points (44.3% to 21.4%).
  • Head-to-head with Adams (Cuomo, Sliwa, Walden drop): Mamdani leads by 24.4 points (44.4% to 20.0%).
  • Head-to-head with Cuomo (Adams, Sliwa, Walden drop): Mamdani leads by 11.0 points (42.0% to 31.0%).

Undecided Voters
In a head-to-head matchup between Mamdani and Cuomo, 27% of voters remain undecided. This bloc is mainly made up of older New Yorkers split between Democrats and Republicans, making it a pivotal group that could tip the balance of the race.


That's only one poll but all the polling puts Zohran in the lead.  Lies?  That's the tool to destroy him.  Jonathan Turley got a pass on his lie.  I may be the first one to note it on the left.  He got away with it.  He should have gotten the online equivalent of having his face smashed through glass for lying like he did.  Now he's emboldened and thinks he can get away with it again and, if caught, just do another 'woopsie!'  Roger Anderson needs to be called out universally.  Brit boy the neoconservative is not a trusted or objective source.  To pretend you're 'reporting' on Zohran's campaign and only serve up that idiot is to demonstrate that you're not a reporter but you are someone trying to work out a grudge.  

These sort of things need to be called out and called out immediately.  I'm not talking about by the campaign, I'm talking about by the media -- especially by so-called left media.

Otherwise, just sit back and watch Zohran go down in the polls as these attacks on him multiply.


Former Attorney General Bill Barr gave a deposition to the House Oversight Committee and he did not clear Donald Chump on any Epstein connections and/or entanglements. Lawrence O'Donnell noted that in the opening of his program last night.  (This video has over 391,000 streams, FYI.)



And then he discussed it and other Epstein details with US House Rep Robert Garcia.



Garcia states the GOP spin is false and states that the Committee needs to release the deposition to the public.

However, when it comes to Chump's friends Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, nothing is open to the public -- not Epstein's client list, not how Maxwell got moved to Camp Fed in Texas this month, nothing is open to the public.  Everything is done behind closed doors -- like Bob Barr's deposition.


MSNBC’s Ari Melber addressed the ongoing scandal with Nancy Erika Smith and John Flannery yesterday, reviewing basics and putting together a timeline.  




Released a little over 12 hours ago, the video already has over 488,000 streams. 

This story is not going away. 

Nor is the truth of Chump's war on immigrants.  


A federal judge in Manhattan has ordered the immediate release of a gay asylum seeker from Jamaica, finding that ICE violated his right to due process.

U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres ordered the agency to release Rickardo Anthony Kelly, 40, more than two weeks after he was detained while waiting for his asylum hearing at a courthouse accompanied by his attorney. Agents reportedly offered him $1,000 to self-deport, and apprehended him when he refused.

"In light of the undisputed facts, there is no doubt that [ICE's] ongoing detention of [Kelly] with no process at all, much less prior notice, no showing of changed circumstances, or an opportunity to respond, violates his due process rights," Torres wrote in her ruling, issued Friday. 

Kelly said in his initial writ of habeas corpus petition that he came to the U.S. on a tourist visa in 2021 shortly after he was the victim of a violent attack motivated by his sexual orientation, during which he was shot ten times. He warned that deporting him to Jamaica would put him at risk, and that keeping him in custody could cause him to experience “severe and quite possibly fatal” medical complications as a diabetic.

Kelly described the conditions of the ICE facility he was detained at as “unconscionable,” “inhumane,” and “horrific.” He claimed he was kept in a room with nearly 100 other detainees that had only three toilets, no doors, and no showers, and that he was not provided with “clean clothes, toiletries, or any other way to maintain basic hygiene.”


It's one horror story after another.  We've noted the six year old girl in New York already this week.  


Immigration agents reportedly detained a 6-year-old girl, her teenage brother and her mother at a Manhattan immigration court last week.

The family, originally from Ecuador, had appeared for a routine check-in at 26 Federal Plaza when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents took them into custody on August 12, according to CBS News.
[. . .]
The mother, identified as Martha, arrived in the U.S. with her daughter Dayra and 19-year-old son Manuel after fleeing violence in their home country, according to immigration advocates who spoke with CBS News.

Dayra attends PS 89, the Jose Peralta School of Dreamers in Queens, according to NBC 4 New York.
Mariposa Benitez, founder of the advocacy group Mi Tlalli, said families like Martha's seek safety after fleeing dangerous situations abroad but face further trauma when detained in this manner.

Shortly after the detention, the family was separated and transferred to different facilities, according to CBS News. Martha and her young daughter were transported to a detention center in Dilley, Texas, while Manuel was taken to Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, the outlet reported.

That's what's going on around the US thanks to Chump and Kristi Noem.  Julianne McShane (MOTHER JONES) has a very disturbing report on the way immigrants are being targeted:

More than 20 state attorneys general have filed suit against the Department of Justice (DOJ), alleging the Trump administration is unlawfully seeking to withhold critical funds for crime victims from states and nonprofits deemed noncompliant with its draconian immigration enforcement efforts.

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Rhode Island on Monday, centers on three notices that DOJ posted last month for funding allocated by a decades-old law called the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA). As I previously reported for Mother Jones, those funds have long been a critical source of support for organizations including domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and child advocacy centers, which use the money to run emergency shelters and hotlines and provide therapy services, legal advocacy, and court accompaniment to abused people, particularly women and children. Another bucket of VOCA funding also goes directly to crime victims, who can use the funds for pay for services including mental health counseling, funeral expenses, and clean-ups of crime scenes.

But under the Trump administration, this year’s round of $1.9 billion in funding comes with strings attached: It stipulates that grantees may not use the funds for any program or activity that, in DOJ’s opinion, “violates (or promotes or facilitates the violation of) federal immigration law…or impedes or hinders” enforcement.

While the funding announcements do not clarify what, exactly, would constitute such violations, the intent seems clear: Trump’s DOJ wants to essentially force states and the programs they fund to grant the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), unfettered access to the victims they serve—conditions that the lawsuit calls “unprecedented.” 

"Playing politics with the lives of people who have suffered so greatly is reckless, it is cruel, and in this case—it is illegal,” said New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, the lead plaintiff, in a statement.

Advocates for crime victims say that, if enacted, these conditions could have a chilling effect on immigrant survivors of violence, who may avoid seeking help for fear of being deported. “One huge barrier for victims to leave an abusive situation is fear of their abusers reporting them to immigration, which is a real threat, even when the survivor has a path to lawful status,” Carmen McDonald, executive director of Survivor Justice Center, a Los Angeles organization that supports immigrant survivors of domestic violence, told me. “This will continue to cause victims to be unsafe at home and have devastating impacts for survivors.”


He is a failure.  He has destroyed this country in every way you can imagine.  And, yes, that includes the economy.  His attack on DC is destroying the DC economy as we speak.  Peter Wade (ROLLING STONE) explains:


Donald Trump's deployment of National Guard troops to the nation's capital and forcing a federal law enforcement takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department is not only terrorizing residents and workers, it's also harming local businesses. Washington, D.C., restaurants are experiencing significant drops in reservations, and bars are seeing fewer customers.
Online reservations for D.C. restaurants plunged more than 25 percent in the days immediately after Trump announced the takeover of D.C. police for the first time in the country's history, according to OpenTable data, WUSA 9's Jordan Fischer reported.

Trump announced the authoritarian occupation on Monday, and OpenTable reservations decreased by 16 percent compared to the same day last year. By Tuesday, reservations were down 27 percent. By Wednesday, that number rose to 31 percent.



Before the president federalized D.C. law enforcement, the area had enjoyed 11 consecutive months of improvements in reservations.

The Advocate described the crackdown as "an economic and cultural crisis" after speaking to LGBTQ+ bar owners.

Bar owner Dave Perruzza said that Friday night felt "like a desert."

"Thursdays are all local, but Fridays and Saturdays we get people from out of town, and we just had none of them. It was awful," he explained.

Perruzza said he had lost $7,000 in a single night.

"That's not sustainable," he insisted.


None of Chump's actions are sustainable.  The country needs a reboot nd we have got to deliver that in the 2026 mid-terms.  Tara Suter (THE HILL) notes:

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Sunday dismissed Trump’s recent crackdown on the nation’s capitol as a “stunt.”

“What’s happening here in Washington, D.C., is just a stunt. Donald Trump didn’t like the fact that the walls were closing in on him, that his own base was questioning why he wouldn’t release the Epstein files, why he was protecting very powerful people,” Murphy told NBC News’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.”


It is a stunt and was meant to stop people talking about the Epstein scandal.  The stunt is harming the economy and the Epstein scandal remaings in the news.  Adam Gabbatt (GUARDIAN) notes:


The Democratic US congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland issued a statement saying Trump’s decision to send the military into the nation’s capital was meant to distract the public from the president’s “close friendship” with the late convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Raskin’s statement also alluded to broken promises from the Trump administration to fully divulge all files pertaining to the prosecutions of Epstein and his associate, the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

“The only emergency here is a lawless president experiencing a growing public relations emergency because of his … stubborn refusal to release the Epstein file despite his promise to do so,” Raskin’s statement said.

Other Democrats echoed the sentiment that Trump’s move was an attempt to distract from criticism over Epstein and an economy that was struggling amid the passage of his congressional agenda bill, which included a historic $1tn cut to Medicaid.


Let's wind down with this from Senator Patty Murray's office:


Murray demands all apportionment data be published online as court order requires

Murray: “It’s clear now why Vought and Trump have fought so hard to prevent this information from being public: they have used this process to secretly and illegally exert even more control over funding approved by Congress, freezing key investments from going out the door for agencies to conduct critical work and help the American people.”

Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, issued the following statement after the Trump administration was forced to put a key spending transparency website back online after breaking the law to take it down so that it could hide how it’s executing spending laws from the American people.

In March, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), headed by Director Russ Vought, illegally took down the apportionments website that it is required by law to maintain. Earlier this month, a federal circuit court unanimously ruled that the administration must restore the website and publicly post all apportionment data that has been hidden from public view over the last few months. Late Friday, OMB finally relented in its months-long fight to continue breaking the law to hide this information—restoring the website and beginning to post some of the apportionments it’s hidden from public view for months.

“Every time any member of this administration tries to claim they are being transparent, remember that they spent months illegally hiding how they were spending your taxpayer dollars. Unfortunately for Russ Vought and President Trump, the law is very clear—and now that a federal appeals court has unanimously ruled they must restore the spending transparency website, the site is back online.

“It should never have required months in court for this administration to begin complying with a truly basic and straightforward transparency requirement. OMB must now ensure every last bit of this important budget data that has been hidden is promptly made public, as the court has ordered, and that the data is posted within days, as the law requires, going forward.

“It’s clear now why Vought and Trump have fought so hard to prevent this information from being public: they have used this process to secretly and illegally exert even more control over funding approved by Congress, freezing key investments from going out the door for agencies to conduct critical work and help the American people.”

Background on Apportionments

Apportionments are legally binding budget decisions issued by OMB under title 31 of the U.S. Code. These documents are final, decisional, and legally binding on agencies, and officials found responsible for violating an apportionment from OMB may be subject to administrative discipline, including suspension without pay and termination. What’s more, the knowing and willful violation of an apportionment carries with it criminal penalties under the Antideficiency Act.

The bipartisan fiscal year 2022 appropriations spending law established a requirement for OMB to publicly post in an accessible format all approved apportionments within two business days, along with any footnotes and an explanation for those footnotes. In the following fiscal year spending law, Congress made those requirements permanent. Those bipartisan requirements were carried out over the last three years without incident—which allowed lawmakers and the public to track OMB’s legal-binding budget decisions.

Background on Russ Vought’s Weaponization of the Apportionment Process

In late March, however, Vought illegally pulled the website down without any explanation—and adamantly refused to restore it, despite bipartisan calls for Vought and OMB to simply follow the law and adhere to this common sense requirement.

Vought’s decision to yank the website offline immediately raised questions about what exactly he and the president were seeking to hide in preventing the American people—and lawmakers responsible for conducting oversight—from accessing this information about how OMB is spending taxpayer dollars. Notably, Vought—a key architect of Project 2025—has long contended that political appointees like himself should have more say in how OMB operates and should exercise significantly more control over federal funding. Over the last many months, Vought has taken sweeping steps to exercise more control—and notably, in President Trump’s first term, OMB illegally used the apportionment process to cut off security assistance for Ukraine, which, of course, was the basis for Trump’s first impeachment.

Earlier this month, public reporting began to shed light on why Trump and Vought have obscured this data from public view. Reports showed OMB had used the apportionment process to block the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from accessing roughly $15 billion in funding provided for lifesaving research into treatments and cures—and then quickly reversed course after the blockage was made public. Just days later, reports also showed that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from spending large chunks of funding for mission critical work that it is required to conduct. Senator Murray slammed both actions—and called for the Trump administration to stop improperly choking off funding approved by Congress and to finally restore the website so the American people have visibility into OMB’s actions.

The apportionments that have so far been made public now that the website has been put back online make clear that Vought and OMB have been using the apportionment process to exert even more control over federal spending and to choke off key funds provided by Congress on a bipartisan basis for all kinds of essential programs that working people and communities nationwide count on every day.

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 The following sites updated: