Trump’s ballroom is getting a huge chunk of money in Senate Republicans’ new reconciliation bill, released late last night. That’s the headline today on many pieces about the legislation.

And it is important: the White House insisted that private donors, not taxpayers, would foot the bill for the ballroom. Now, through a vote where — due to Senate rules — Republicans do not need Democratic support, senators will in fact direct $1 billion of taxpayer funding to security features for the project, which, at times, seems to be all Trump truly cares about.

We, however, have been emphasizing another point about this legislation: it lasts for three years. That means if Democrats retake the House or Senate or both later this year, they’ll be deprived, via this reconciliation bill, of a key mechanism for reining in ICE and CBP: funding. The Constitution equipped Congress to check the executive branch via its power of the purse. This reconciliation bill is just the latest example of Republicans doing all they can to shrug off that responsibility.

I’ve been talking over the last few weeks about critical reforms that are necessary to make any kind of civic democratic revival in the U.S. even possible. The ending the filibuster and reforming the Supreme Court are high on that list. I want to talk about related topic today that we can only see if we take few steps back from the immediacy of day to day events over the last year and a half. These are tied to the over-mighty nature of the American presidency — or rather, the over-mighty potential of the American presidency, which a mix of Donald Trump’s degenerate personality and the theories of the conservative legal movement have brought to the fore.

The difference I want to note is between administration and ownership. We talk a lot these days about how Donald Trump seems to think he owns the United States – he puts his brand, his likeness, his signature on everything. He talks about his generals, his military, etc. But there’s a more concrete and specific way this is true and it goes to the heart of what needs to be fixed about the American presidency and the whole constitutional system.

We’re talking a lot today about gerrymandering and Court reform. I want to note one among many ways the two issues intersect. Democrats are consistent on redistricting. They have and continue to support a national gerrymandering law to outlaw the practice. They restated that commitment today even as they prepare to counter new GOP demands to eliminate Black legislative representation across the South.

We’ve been wondering for a few days now how the White House would seek to convince Congress that the Vietnam-era War Powers Resolution, which requires the executive branch to obtain authorization for hostilities from the legislative branch within 60 days, should not apply.

It emerged yesterday, in Hegseth’s assertion to senators that the April 7 ceasefire “pauses” that 60-day clock, and it was formalized by Trump in a letter sent to Congress this afternoon, which we published a copy of here.

The argument, you will not be surprised to learn, is farcical. Emine Yücel and Josh Kovensky ran it by some experts.

The question of who would have standing to challenge the administration’s war is a thornier one, which Emine and Josh get into here.

Here’s a brief follow up on yesterday’s post about the corrupt Supreme Court. Yesterday I noticed law professor Steve Vladeck arguing on Bluesky that civic democrats are making a mistake by seeking to “fix” the Court by, as he puts it, “permanently weakening it as an institution.” The gist of his argument is that you constrain the Court by “forcing it to look over its shoulder” as it decides case. In a post on the topic, he writes, “as compared to a time when Congress controlled things like when the Court sits; where it sits; which cases it hears; the Court’s budget; and what the justices must do when not hearing cases (i.e., ride their circuits), today’s Court can do just about whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and all without realistically having to look over its shoulder.”

I told him that I actually agree with the concept of having the court “look over its shoulder” — that you have a series of teeth in place to react to overreach. I’m not sure about the best method of applying that pressure. But I agree with the general principle. Or, rather, I did agree with it — but I think we’ve missed the window for that kind of intervention from Congress. (You can see our brief exchange here.)

It’s a good day to return to the question of the Supreme Court’s corruption and the necessity of reforming it in order to make democratic self-government possible again in the United States. The federal constitution is an expansive document. Within the system begun with Marbury v. Madison – which is subject to many reasonable critiques – it is possible to have more liberal or conservative jurisprudences, loosely tethered to the progress of presidencies and senates. The Roberts court is a different beast. It is the product of a decades-long effort to corrupt the federal judiciary. That degree of corruption first came into full view in the second decade of this century when the Court openly began to do three closely interrelated but conceptually distinct things.

First, The Meaning of Words is For Little People.

The Court has, with increasing boldness, manufactured new doctrines and text out of the constitution which simply do not exist in the document. Often they are implicitly or even explicitly ruled out by the plain text itself. The greatest example is the 2024 presidential immunity decision, a ruling contradicted by all the history of the document as well as its clear language. The framers knew how to create immunity. They did it for the work of Congress. They declined to do it for Presidents. The entirety of the decision is manufactured out of whole clothe. Whether the majority falsified this immunity because they thought it should exist or specifically for the benefit of Donald Trump hardly matters. It is corrupt, illegitimate and a wholesale attack on the constitution itself. The Court have also increasingly resorted to plainly absurd textual analysis to change the meaning of constitutional language the meaning of which has never been in doubt. The current birthright citizenship case, whatever the majority decides, is another example.

Second, The Choose Your Own Adventure Constitution.

Closely related to point one, the Court no longer has any consistent or even comprehensible jurisprudence. It simply has political goals it seeks to achieve – presidential immunity, an increasingly absolute right to firearms, a 14th amendment focused primarily on race not actually existing. Arguments are chosen by convenience simply as backfill to arrive at the desired end. The corruption often emerges most clearly in those brief moments when the logical conclusions of the Court’s own arguments are too much for even it to bear. Again, we have a recent example. Presidents can fire anyone in the executive branch based on nothing more than the presidential will, even when Congress has specifically given them protections against such dismissals. Except the Federal Reserve, even thought it is by every measure an independent federal agency constitutionally indistinguishable from the rest. Why is it different? Because Federalist Society ideologues actually don’t like inflationary monetary policy. So in this one case, it’s different … even when it’s not.

Third, Political Power if For Republicans Only.

While the corrupt majority has consistently advanced and enforced an ideological vision of how the country should be run it has another simpler brief: not allowing Democrats to govern when they are in power. When Republicans are in power the powers of presidency are almost limitless; when it’s Democrats the office is feeble and hemmed in by a cobweb of invented doctrines. We had the ironic benefit of two Trump presidencies sandwiching a Biden presidency to make this principle of action crystal clear. Quite simply, the corrupt majority ensures that only Republicans actually get the fruits of political victories.

In our thinned out political discourse people often use the term “corruption” to refer only to venal corruption – bribes, conflicts of interest mostly involving money, kept Justices like Clarence Thomas. That is neither the only nor the most significant form of corruption. In most cases venal corruption is significantly self-correcting. It gets exposed and prosecuted. The more general meaning of corruption is when a form of rot takes over an office or institution because of systemic and ingrained abuses of power. That is the case with the Supreme Court and it’s especially dangerous with the Supreme Court because a mix of history and restraint have left very few checks on its abuses. The Supreme Court is given specific powers to achieve specific ends. Over the last 15 years it has assumed vast new powers and used them consistently for anti-constitutional ends. Far from interpreting or defending the constitution it is at war with it. An orderly, proper and essential process of reform is entirely possible by simple statute law on simple majority votes.

Kate Riga and I will discuss today’s Supreme Court ruling, the ominous oral arguments that followed, and, if we’ve had enough coffee, what hope there is for the future of multiracial democracy in a Substack Live tomorrow at 10 a.m. ET.

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We’re about 90% of the way to our goal in our annual TPM Membership Drive. If you’ve somehow missed the theme of the drive, it’s that we here at TPM are chronicling the national crisis. The national crisis we’re talking about obviously includes Donald Trump, who is something akin to a great accelerator or catalyst. 

But if you’ve followed our Supreme Court coverage today, you know that the crisis neither began when Trump took office nor will it end when he leaves office. There is a lot of work to do. Much of that work cannot be done by journalists. But the documenting of abuse by public officials not only can be done by journalists but must be done by journalists. So, if you’ve been putting off joining for whatever reason, make today the day and help us hit our goal so we can do our part in return.

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There is a dimension to the latest developments in the redistricting wars that isn’t hidden precisely but isn’t getting the attention it should. Put simply, Donald Trump’s interests are rapidly diverging from those of his House Republicans.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis just introduced a new Florida House map which purports to net Republicans an additional four seats in November. But Florida incumbents are more than a little spooked about it. They don’t like it. When you aggressively gerrymander a state, you do more than create more seats for your party. You also create some level of risk that that map will amplify a wave election into a true blowout. Thin the margin of your safe seats enough to create some more safe or favorable seats and all those existing seats become a bit more vulnerable. It’s only a real danger in a wave election. But that’s precisely what 2026 looks like.

This morning I was reading this Puck article about the public relations woes of the AI industry. In short, having the CEOs and industry leaders tell everyone for years that their product will lose jobs for half the population and quite possibly lead to the extinction of humanity led to some serious reputational challenges for AI. (The article is paywalled. But that and what follows includes the gist.) Author Ian Krietzberg correctly notes that this isn’t just blather or bad messaging. It’s an investment strategy. Silicon Valley venture investing is essentially a well-oiled FOMO machine. Getting people to invest means pumping up the disruptive, game-changing nature of the product. Disruptive dislocation is the basis of all Silicon Valley venture investing since it’s the basis of the stratospheric growth of a small percentage of bets which makes the whole economy make sense.

But that’s not the entirety of it. Or rather the mentality of the key players in the space is so bound up and shaped by the dynamics of the investment logic. In so many words, it breeds a feral mentality and personality type. It’s no accident that you have architects of that world having famous mottos like “move fast and break things.” It’s a culture based on hyperbole and valorizing transgressive attitudes and actions.