Secret Police and Not-So-Secret Power Grabs (Hour 2)

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You're listening to Mornings with Pat Craiglow powered by Up North News.

Now, for my Lake Minnesota studio, here is the founding editor of Up North News, Pat Craiglow.

Good morning.

It is 7 0 6.

Nice to have you here up north.

On this Friday morning, August 15, 2025, it is a National Hawaiian Shirt Day.

It is National Kool-Aid Day to mark its creation at some small town in Nebraska where they have a big festival this weekend.

It's National Lemon Morang Eye Day.

And best of all, it's Friday.

That's really all you need to know.

Parker Olson is producing us down in Madison Studio A2.

Brittany Merleau is on the way.

So is Jim Santel, former U.S.

Attorney.

So is Mark Jacob.

And then in our next hour, we're going to be talking to Mike Clemens live from Indianapolis.

for the Packers pre-season game coming up against the Indianapolis Colts.

That will be happening tomorrow afternoon.

But before all of that let's get you some Brewer's tickets because not only do I have the Hawaiian shirt on it's the Brewer's Hawaiian shirt with a nice little logo on it here because well, it's time to build on that 12 game winning streak going up against the Cincinnati Reds and That'll take place this evening starting at 505 the pregame on several stations across the Civic Media radio network and So they're on the road this weekend.

They'll be back next weekend.

How would you?

like to win four tickets to the game next Saturday night, August 23rd against the San Francisco Giants.

Well then take part in our free Ticket Friday text-to-win contest.

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Text it before nine o'clock and you will be in the running to win on Free Ticket Friday.

as if that weren't enough to boost your spirits heading into the weekend.

Meteorologist Brittany Merleau has made her return to the early morning shift and is able to tell us about a weekend forecast.

All right, after we talk about her.

Brittany, good morning.

How are you?

Good morning.

I'm hanging in there.

Slowly getting better, moving a little

bit more.

Yeah.

All right.

Good.

It's so great to have you back.

I mean, I wish we had a great forecast to share, but that's that's how these things work.

You know, yesterday I had to wrestle with the top on the Jeep to get it back on just in time before a few raindrops started falling.

And some folks, it sounds like are going to get more than just a couple of raindrops this weekend.

Yes, we are looking at another potential for some flooding throughout the state.

We've got waves of rain, showers, thunderstorms, strong to severe, heavy, heavy torrential downpours expected in some places.

So we're going to see flooding again this weekend.

It's not if, it's when, and where.

We're going to look at about three to four different MCSs just continuing to roll through our state.

So we're already going to see

Well, some body sprinkles here this morning are already rolling through.

Chances for those still this afternoon, but really they wind down.

We'll see plenty of sunshine today.

High heat, high humidity, with temperatures going to the mid to upper 80s, low 90s down south.

Humidity is going to be high, dew points into the mid 70s.

So our heat index is really going to be feeling like those low to mid 90s today.

So very sticky, very summery.

But then we've also got the Storm Prediction Center putting out a slight risk for a good chunk of the state, pretty much from Hayward to Eau Claire, over to La Crosse, Wausau, Rhinelander, all the way to Appleton area as well.

So what we're looking at is storms starting this afternoon through this evening.

Models are seeing different times that they're going to start, but they are going to be hitting us and going through tonight, winding down around midnight or so.

Then another round sparks up tomorrow morning, and that one could have some very strong damaging high wind gusts.

We're also looking at the potential for tornadoes, potentially today too, and also big hail as well.

So as if that wasn't enough, the rainfall, yes, a lot of added moisture, tropical humidity still sitting here.

You know, you're going to feel it today, and the storms are going to drink that juice.

They are going to be able to downpour again.

A good half an inch to an inch is going to be expected tonight.

And then we're looking at another one to two inches possible tomorrow and another one to two inches as we go into Saturday and Sunday as well.

And the system still lingers over us Monday where we're still looking at one inch totals in different places and Tuesday still some scattered showers too.

So this is kind of like last weekend where the system set up in the front stalled.

And we had different outflow boundaries where when another system whirled right over that, it kind of sparked and flared up and ate more and dumped even more across us.

That's going to have the same potential as we go into this weekend.

So heads up, stay safe, you know, keep in tune with the forecast.

And, you know, I would be careful if you're going to be doing things outdoors this weekend because things change fast.

Letting happens fast.

Clearly none of this matters.

to a lot of our listeners who are out there going, well, here's Rob and Tigerton.

Brittany always brings the sunshine every morning.

Here's Alicia going, Brittany's back.

And puts and even corrects the spelling of the name, just so.

Let's see, Rob also says, good morning from Tigerton.

It's partly cloudy, 67, some sprinkles in the area.

Yesterday had some big yards to mow in Tigerton, three more yard jobs today.

Tigerton has a motor cross race over the weekend at the ATV UTV park.

Looks like it's going to be a very muddy.

motocross race.

He says the daylight hours continue to shrink sunrise at the 6am hours sunset before eight.

Yeah, we talked about that yesterday.

So nothing we can stop just simply recognize it.

He also notes four years ago today he went to see his mom one last time before her passing on August 16th and says that he really misses her and so obviously our our thoughts are with you as well Rob.

He says, uh, you know, be careful on the roads.

The heavy rains could wash out the roads, put some ponding on there.

Uh, Alicia says she's going to be at an irreverent warrior's hike in Milwaukee and would really rather have some less active weather in the area.

But obviously, you know, we, we got to, um, we get what we get.

I guess

that's the

way we got to put it, Brittany.

And fingers crossed that it stays away from Milwaukee until after that.

And there's chances it will.

Yeah.

And I don't know what you said about the storms.

You know, I'm being juiced up.

Tony puts on YouTube.

I did not know Storms drank juice.

I hope

it's not juice filled with sugar so that they're just running around all night.

That's hysterical.

That's exactly what they're doing this weekend, I

guess.

That's great.

That's all we need is storms that are on a sugar high, you know?

Brittany, it's great to see you.

Feel better and have a nice weekend.

Talk to you next hour, get that forecast up your way.

And again, our free Ticket Friday keyword is first F-I-R-S-T for your chance to win Brewer's tickets for next week.

Remember, you can sign up for our newsletters, including our Sunday morning politics newsletter, all about what's happening in Wisconsin over the past week or so.

Sign up at UpNorthNewsWI.com, answer our question of the week.

Should politicians

have personal accounts on social media or while they are elected officials, should they delete those accounts?

During one of the commercial breaks, I hold up my very messy post-it note as I was logging all the yeses and noes.

It is overwhelming at the moment that people say politicians should delete their accounts, but there were plenty of responses saying, nope, leave it up.

It's more or less a window into their soul.

And if they are depraved individuals like certain members of Congress, well,

You know, all the better that the constituents get to see just what they are really like and not just speaking behind, you know, official press releases and things like that.

So again, that's this week's question of the week.

There will be a new one coming up this Sunday morning.

You can sign up over at UpNorthNewsWI.com.

From the Daily Beast, the headline, Sean Duffy claims he knows whose job Donald Trump really wants.

Okay.

Apparently, Sean Duffy, the former congressman from up north, now the transportation secretary and the acting head of NASA, gave an interview to the New York Post columnist Miranda Devine, where Sean Duffy revealed that Trump once told him if he weren't president, he'd want to run the Department of Transportation.

Why?

Sean Duffy says, he really is fascinated and cares about roads and bridges and what kind of pavement is being used.

And Duffy went on to say that Trump genuinely cares about building beautiful roads and bridges just so long as they're cheap.

I mean, at least he's still in character, right?

Duffy told Devine, I think he said 20 cents on the dollar, save 80 cents.

That's a little tough, but he cares about that.

and Divine the Host said, if you get rid of regulations, that should make it cheaper and easier to which Duffy agreed.

Yeah, yeah, those regulations, I mean, guardrails, stop signs, you know, other safety concerns for roads and bridges, or bridges could fall down.

We've seen that happen.

Which do you think would happen if Donald Trump were the Secretary of Transportation?

As if that weren't enough, the Daily Beast goes on.

As if that weren't enough to lure Trump away from the Oval Office, Duffy said the president is also drawn to airspace.

When divine inquired about Trump's love of the ether, Duffy explained his reasoning saying, quote, you know, he flies.

Um, he talks to pilots.

He loves airplanes.

I wish I was making this up, but I mean, this is a genuine news story to the New York Post.

which is, you know, the print equivalent of Fox News, which is not any kind of equivalent of news.

And yeah, Donald Trump should be Secretary of Transportation because he wants to build big, beautiful, but cheap bridges.

And he should run NASA because he talks to pilots and he's on airplanes a lot.

Divine called Trump's interest in transportation surprising.

But Duffy chalked it up to the president's long history of developing skyscrapers, resorts and casinos.

What he didn't mention is several of those ventures went bust.

There's Trump's Atlantic City Empire that famously ended with the 2021 demolition of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, the first of three casinos he owned before his Jersey Shore gambling business collapsed.

Duffy also took a shot at Elon Musk over the tech billionaire's attempts to slash air control, air traffic control positions.

Duffy said, I get along well enough with you with Elon, but no one else is the secretary of transportation.

I am.

The Senate confirmed me.

So there's Sean Duffy taking a shot at Elon Musk and saying that Donald Trump, if he couldn't be president, would be transportation secretary.

If Donald Trump is actually willing to take on that role, if he would be willing to stand down from the presidency and in return, he could be the transportation secretary, I mean, who wouldn't take that, right?

I mean, that's, that sounds like a bargain compared to the cost of, you know, rolling tanks through the streets of Washington, D.C.

and...

Honestly, Lord only knows how much all of the secret police kidnappings and roundups are costing this country.

I would take that deal.

I mean, I may not fly.

I may not go over a single bridge over the time that he's transportation secretary, but I would definitely consider taking him up.

on that kind of a deal.

So again, that's a New York Post interview as quoted in The Daily Beast.

As mentioned, the Brewers are playing in Cincinnati.

505 is the pregame.

The Packers are playing tomorrow, a preseason game against the Indianapolis Colts.

That's a noon game tomorrow.

And Mike Clemens is live in Indianapolis, and he will join us just over an hour from now to talk more about that.

Still ahead, our Week in Review panel.

Well, at least two-thirds of them.

Former U.S.

Attorney Jim Santel and journalist Mark Jacob will be along.

A local update is next for some of you.

I'm Pat Crightlow.

Thanks for joining us.

Mornings powered by UpNorth News here on the Civic Media Radio Network, where you can follow what we do at UpNorthNewsWI.com.

Sign up for those newsletters while you're there.

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Head over to Spotify and follow us.

This is the Civic Media Radio Network.

Coming up in our next

hour, I'm going to be talking about a new report from a nonpartisan research group that outlines how the Wisconsin state budget

is going to draw down the multi-billion dollar surplus.

Good.

And that's how it's supposed to work.

A surplus isn't supposed to just sit there for years being squandered as Republicans in the legislature have allowed.

It's coming back in a balanced form of increased investments and tax cuts, which maybe should say something to the voters when it comes to, you know, who should be in elected positions the next time there's a state budget.

So we'll talk about that in our next hour.

But.

Before we turn to former US Attorney Jim Santel and journalist Mark Jacob, we're going to review the latest moves by the Trump regime, whether it's military takeover of Washington DC streets or sending armed masked troops at a rally by California's governor or inviting Russia's war criminal dictator to a summit on American soil in Alaska today.

This is a president that is all about putting on a show.

in front, even though in the back, he keeps losing in courtrooms as judges strike down more of his illegal orders.

So we'll go over all that with Jim Santel and Mark Jacob.

And more, there's also a new appeals court judge who Trump is gonna be nominating for Wisconsin as well.

Jennifer Schulze is off this week.

We'll see her next week.

Mark and James, how are you?

Good morning.

Good morning, Pat.

Good to be with you.

Yep, good to have you here as well.

Jim, let's start local first and let's talk about that new appeals court.

Judge nominee.

And let's see, the name is Rebecca Tabelson.

Is

that right?

That's correct.

Absolutely right.

She's an assistant United States attorney.

Spent some time in Washington, D.C.

I know her.

I'll put that right up front, so take with whatever that qualifies for.

I have a grain of salt here, but she is a good lawyer and she is a very professional.

She is the kind of person that the Department of Justice

should be putting up there in their courts.

And this is a good nomination.

There plainly will be those who are opposing her.

But I will tell you that Rebecca has done an outstanding job on behalf of the people of this country.

I actually did not work with her directly, but her husband is also in the US Attorney's Office.

I know them well just by virtue of things having to do with the US Attorney's Office here in Milwaukee generally.

I applaud, I applaud the nomination of her for this important post.

Well, I want to get Mark Jacobs' reaction to your answer because here's why from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Tableson clearly has strong conservative credentials.

A member of the Federalist Society.

She was a law clerk for court justices Antonin Scalia and Brett Kavanaugh, according to her LinkedIn profile.

She's been an assistant U.S.

attorney in Milwaukee for nearly a decade.

Mark, a former U.S.

attorney like Jim Santel, is willing to vouch for a conservative that Trump wants to appoint to the court.

Does that give us hope that America's not dead yet?

Well, yeah, I mean, I like it the way the normal way, you know, the kind of the pre-Trump way where you, you know, actually thought that judges would rule based on the merits of the case.

You know, I mean, I

know that's a

crazy idea, but I like that, you know, instead you have Trump, you know, appointing people like Aileen Cannon who

totally sabotage the criminal case against Trump and you get you get a lot of federal judges that are being named, you know, the MO Bovi, you know, that guy.

You know, Trump, I think Trump has really perverted the whole purpose of the courts to his own advantage.

It's part of his overall scheme to seize power and become a dictator, frankly.

But yeah, I'm with we have seen in some of the lower courts.

That some of the judges who were named by Trump have ruled against him.

I mean

and and and and I accept that I you know, I actually accept the courts I would like to see our courts do better I think the Supreme Court is kind of compromised now for many reasons But generally I think our federal courts have been doing a pretty good job

The nomination is coming from Trump.

And you'll recall, we talked about this a couple of weeks back, Jim, that Trump was making these moves without necessarily consulting the senators.

In this case, Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson, Tammy Baldwin saying that she looks forward to vetting Rebecca Tabelson and then weighing in, although I'm sure she would have appreciated being able to do that on the front end, as is traditionally done.

But Jim, you're saying despite the unorthodox

you know, appointment process that's going on right now, you know, we're not looking at another alien canon situation here in Wisconsin at least.

I do not think so.

I'd be very surprised if when she takes the bench in the 7th Circuit again, it is an important spot.

This is again one of the 12 or 13 appeals courts right below the Supreme Court.

This is not a district court.

She's not going to be a trial judge.

And again, there are those people who will look to her and say, you've never been a judge, but she's been in the courtroom on a regular basis, especially here in the federal court in

downtown Milwaukee.

But this, again, we all have to recognize, as Mark was implicitly of not explicitly saying, that elections do have consequences.

A president, a normal decent president, has the right to appoint those qualified people to the bench that he may choose.

She does have conservative credentials.

The fact of the matter is, for 30 years, I worked with both Republicans and Democrats.

We never talked about it, but we knew that our political persuasions were in different directions.

It should not matter in terms of prosecution.

It should not matter on the bench.

You apply the law to the facts, the facts, the law.

And their other reality is that while these cases sometimes percolate up from some of the big appeals courts out there, New York and Florida and maybe California, the reality is that the great majority of cases that even the court of appeals handles in Chicago do not implicate these major headline grabbing issues that we see all the time.

Every so often, yes, they review important things.

The great majority

of their docket are things having to do with that only lawyers would love contracts and real estate and all kinds of things that are sort of mundane important to the litigants.

That's the kind of person you want somebody who's going to be serious, academic, thoughtful.

And I believe that Rebecca based upon her past history as a prosecutor, I was going to do just that.

And I want to believe you.

All I'm saying is that you you knew what Justice Alito was like.

You had a fairly good idea what Kavanaugh was going to be like.

But

The key that I'm getting to here is John Roberts.

And the things that he has allowed this court to do, the way he's been either run roughshod or has simply joined in with the extreme partisan justices, should give every nomination an extra examination just to do our due diligence on behalf of democracy.

We will have more coming up after the Midwest Farm Report with Jim Santel and Mark Jacob.

I'm Pat Crichtlow.

This is the Civic Media Radio Network.

you

Welcome back to our mornings powered by up North news here on the civic media radio network.

I'm packed right low in Chippewa Falls.

It is free ticket Friday across the civic media radio network.

And so call up a station that you're listening to on the civic media app and use the text feature.

And before nine o'clock, just text the word first.

FIRST, and you'll be in the running for a statewide drawing for four tickets to see the Brewers versus the San Francisco Giants next week, Saturday, August 23rd.

It's an evening game.

You have to be able to receive and use electronic tickets on your phone to take part and make these tickets useful for you.

So again, FIRST, FIRST is what you want to text us before 9 a.m.

Jennifer Schulze is off this week, but I do want to call attention to her substack newsletter known as Indistinct.

to chatter and her latest issue says a country in peril needs journalists that it can count on so again search at news Jennifer on substack to get the latest there and then of course there's a Mark Jacob who joins us along with former US Attorney Jim Santel and Mark you're stopped the press's newsletter

includes a Q&A with the very influential journalism instructor Jay Rosen.

And we talked about this on the show a couple days ago when I was talking about your newsletter.

And this this term that he's coined called verification in reverse, which I guess is another description for performative line or

down the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole, whatever you want to call it.

But how does he describe reverse verification?

Well, he uses two terms.

He uses the term nullifying the real and verification in reverse.

And they kind of mean the same thing.

They mean that established documented facts are being undone by the Trump administration that they thinks that we that have been proven true, that we know are true.

They're casting doubt on, you know, that and their

You know even this week as we I published that Q&A with Jay Rosen There was a new obvious example, which was in DC where you have these crime statistics that that without question

show that DC crime is down.

And that violent crime is at a 30 year low.

And Trump just simply says, well, I don't believe that.

That's all rigged.

He doesn't explain why it's rigged.

He doesn't explain who rigged it.

He just says it's rigged.

And he says, he knows that crime is skyrocketing.

Well, he doesn't say how he knows it.

He obviously just is making it up and just pulling it out of his behind.

But this is a very dangerous and corrosive thing for society when things that we know are true

are suddenly undone by radicals like Trump.

And some people believe it.

I mean, vaccines are another example.

I mean, we know that vaccines have saved many, many lives.

And for us to be undoing vaccines now, he's going to kill people.

He's killing people by doing this.

And unfortunately, it's not just the people who are gullible enough to believe him.

It's people who, you know, live in society and get diseases that people spread.

I mean, it's, you know, I'm saying when you, when, when you have a pandemic, it's not just the, the people who won't get treated or won't wear a mask or whatever.

who get hurt, everyone gets hurt, because this is public health.

And so there are just a lot of examples of that.

And it's just an all-out assault on facts, and the very idea that there are facts.

And it's alarming.

And it's what fascists do to seize power.

I mean, and we really saw it on day one of the first term with Kellyanne Conway talking about alternative facts.

Now, Jim, I don't have specific examples here, but I do know that there have been a couple occasions where Trump attorneys have been essentially laughed out of court for, again, doing what this is, which is trying to undermine facts by

attacking the source of the facts as as biased but you can't just say something as biased when you have a metric of a proven fact and yet I see that that has not even in the courts that hasn't stopped people from trying to nullify reality.

And this

I think is how we mark

the constitutional crisis we've been in since March 15th.

You've got people assisting United States attorneys, department lawyers appearing in front of judges like James Bosberg, he's the fellow who's handling the 238 deportees to El Salvador, Paula Zinnis, many others on many other issues out there, attorneys who are being told

Mark mentioned before, Emil Beauvais, soon to be on the third circuit, being told when you go into court, it's okay to say, basically, FU judge, and we're not gonna give you the information.

We will misrepresent to you if we need to do that.

And actually this coming Saturday, I'll do a little bit of a plug.

We're gonna talk about, on my show, do something, I'll talk about something called

the presumption of regularity, which is the Department of Justices for years, decades, department across administrations have had this reputation inside judicial circles for being reliable.

If a judge looks at me and says, Mr. Santel, what is the fact on that?

I either said, here's what it is, judge, or I will find out.

That's presumption of regularity.

A huge number of cases now where that no longer attends and judges are no longer giving

It's not just the benefit of the doubt.

It's not a presumption that they'll always be winning in court.

But it's this notion that government should tell you honestly what the facts are and argue from those facts.

That is now being erased.

It's called the presumption of regularity.

And we no longer have it.

Judges are commenting about it in those terms today.

Exactly what Mark has described, the facts no longer important based upon instruction from your Department of Justice to go into court and not.

say what the truth is.

And so that happens in the present in our courts, which has, you know, some real consequences for our future.

But Mark, even in the past, this is happening going backward and engaging in this as we saw most readily at the Smithsonian this week.

And again, this is right out of the fascism playbook of, you know, monkeying around with history.

Yeah, it is.

And in its

It's interesting I put something on both blue sky this week because people compare with the rise of Trumpism to the rise of Nazism You know and there are a lot of actual comparisons that are valid But I think it's more like the Soviet Union.

I think it's more like Stalin where you had you know, what you've maybe you've seen pictures of Stalin with somebody and then there's another version of the picture in which the person has been removed from the picture just disappeared because Stalin was big on

disappearing reality and on and on rewriting history just to make you know constantly and the Orwell's 1984 that's what the lead character is that's his job is to rewrite history you know to not because they got new facts but because the big brother wanted him to and it's frightening and what's happening with at the Smithsonian is that Trump is

is ordering them to turn over all this documentation, even just the internal communications about how they came up with exhibits or their websites.

And he wants a complete examination of their websites and their exhibits.

And he wants them to avoid divisive narratives and be more positive.

Well, I don't know how you get positive about the wounded knee massacre or slavery.

or, you know, the Japanese incarceration during World War II.

I mean, there's some things about American history are ugly.

Some things are great.

We need to talk about both of them.

And if it's going to be one of these things where the museums of this country are not fact-based and are just kind of somebody's fantasy land, if it's going to be a theme park for lies like that, we're in big trouble.

And generations of Americans will grow up thinking that things are just completely not true.

Yeah, it's a matter of making things disappear that you don't like or you don't believe in, whether it is history or whether it is people, you know, a dark skinned who you suspect might not be properly documented.

But of course, in some cases, you know, citizens are being rounded up as well.

But it also comes in the nature of disappearing people who do not have homes.

And Jim, you've been watching what you know, Chief Justice John Roberts and others have done with this court.

You've watched how Trump has conveniently

used the homeless population as a pretext to put federal troops on the streets.

And tell us about the connection to, you know, Justice Roberts and the court's actions on homelessness overall.

Another connection here.

We talk a lot about how in one term, the Supreme Court, for example, says the president has got to be nimble and athletic and muscular in doing things.

And sure enough, within a year, that's exactly what Donald Trump in the wrong direction is doing.

Here's another one.

We talked about it on this very broadcast about a year ago at this time path.

And that is a case called Grants Pass came out of Oregon.

The question was whether or not municipalities, law enforcement, leaders of our cities can enforce ordinances to move people, homeless people off of public properties to who knows where.

And the question is whether or not that's cruel and unusual punishment

And the Supreme Court at the pen of John Roberts and others said, sure, go right ahead.

You can do that.

No Eighth Amendment problem there at all, much to the consternation of a woman named Sonia Sotomayor, at least to others on the bench who said, no, everybody has a right to live somewhere, somewhere.

And of course, that's a truth that we would all acknowledge.

The Supreme Court saying, we don't really care about that.

And sure enough, here it is a year later.

We've got reporting just from last night.

about the federal authorities sweeping in these various locations in Washington, DC.

Places that we all know when you visit there, the libraries, DuPont Circle, Washington Square, other places where they're going in now and with authority of the president.

And I would offer with the Supreme Court a year ago in Grants Pass saying, you got to leave now and we're going to ship you off.

And the concern is also beyond just moving you off.

and denying the notion you've got a right to live somewhere, the notion is also, are we going to institutionalize you?

Are you going to incarcerate you for engaging in ordinance violations?

That kind of thing.

That may well be next.

The whole idea behind this, of course, is we do have a problem in major cities related to homeless people, principally because of the homeless themselves, because they do have a right to live somewhere.

We need, again, to embrace those kinds of things.

that address those issues.

Nobody is arguing about that.

The notion is you use law enforcement, you use military to come in and effectuate this commission given by the Supreme Court, move these people away, get them, get them gone.

And the Supreme Court a year ago saying, go ahead, Donald, you can do just that.

The thing about the homeless problem is, I mean, everyone knows it's a problem.

And, but.

A responsible leader would start working on affordable housing and mental health initiatives.

They wouldn't say, just get the call in the military to push them out of my sight, which is in effect what Trump is doing.

And it's not a solution.

It's not a humane solution.

It's just not even a practical solution.

It's just an appearances solution.

And so much of what you see with Trumpism

is that it looks good and it makes no sense.

Right.

And that gets us to what we'll wrap up here is some of Donald Trump's latest court setbacks.

There was a federal judge ordering the Department of Health and Human Services to stop giving deportation officials access to the personal information, including home addresses of all 79 million Medicaid enrollees.

Because last month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under Trump entered into an agreement that gave daily access to the

Department of Homeland Security to view the personal data, including social security numbers and home addresses of every Medicaid enrollee.

And in another setback for the Trump administration, a federal judge struck down guidance from the US Education Department aimed at ending diversity programs at schools and colleges.

But Jim, I bring these up because those setbacks don't get nearly the attention.

He loves how things appear.

But when the rubber meets the road and he gets into court, yeah, he's won some, but he's

lost a lot.

He's lost money more than he has won at the both the district court level, the appellate court level.

And once again, these are judges.

When we go back and think about the people, Donald Trump is nominating both qualified and unqualified.

lawyers to the bench.

These are judges who are saying, wait a minute, let's take a look at what the Constitution says.

Let's take a look at what the commissioning language for the Department of Social Security Agency, the administration.

Let's take a look at what the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to be all about and making decisions based upon what Congress permitted

and did not permit.

And the judges are saying, you can't do this.

And here again, a connection from the Supreme Court.

Recall well that the Supreme Court had permitted him to go in and mine all the social security information.

All right, Jim Santel, Mark Jacob, a local update is next for some of you and much more in the next hour here on the Civic Media Radio Network.

You're listening to Civic Media.

Find the latest news, information, and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website, civicmedia.us.

Hey, welcome back.

We are now on Blue Sky as well for social media.

Head over to Blue Sky as the alternative to the Dumpster Fire, formerly known as Twitter.

Although Up North News is still on Twitter as well.

Let's see, we got a phone call in from Ollie in the Northwoods to say, please let Jim and Mark know that if we're up to her, this rewriting of history should be called Trump's Grim Fairy Tales.

Very nice, Ollie.

Thank you very much for that.

Mark, let's talk about

what's happening in Texas or what's outside of Texas with Texas Democrats in the legislature saying they're ready to come back in because they've heard from California Governor Gavin Newsom that they're going to try to ask voters to approve new maps that offset the corrupt cartography going on down in Texas.

We asked, you know, folks in our newsletter, you know, it's just two wrongs don't make a right.

And there are plenty of people that say, no, in this case, you can't bring a knife to a gunfight.

And if this is what Texas is going to do, we're going to have to race to the bottom.

But, you know, it wasn't their idea to race to the bottom.

It was Donald Trump's.

No, it was his decision in the middle of a decade to decide to, you know, to.

redraw the maps in Texas for no other reason than to steal five congressional seats.

Their assault on free and fair elections is appalling.

And it's, again, it's just fascist playbook.

It's what they do.

And clearly, gerrymandering is bad.

I live in Illinois, and we have democratic gerrymandering.

There's no question about that.

Texas already, I think, has Republican gerrymandering and they're trying to make it worse.

And what's needed really, I think, is a national solution.

I mean, you need a situation in which nobody does it anywhere.

And what's really important, instead of saying, well, Democrats and Republicans, they're both guilty of it, they're both equally bad.

No, what you need to realize is Democrats are calling for reform in the system.

Republicans like it the way it is now.

because they think that they can game the system better than the other side.

Well, especially when you have a US Supreme Court, Jim, that, you know, when Wisconsin and other cases came before them, you know, the retired Justice Anthony Kennedy and others kind of gave the see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil when it comes to partisan gerrymandering rather than racial gerrymandering.

So I mean, in many ways, we are still living the legacy of the Roberts court saying not it when it comes to finding that kind of a national solution.

a dramatic statement for the Supreme Court to make that, again, when it comes to the Voting Rights Act, yes, indeed, we'll take a look at racially animated decisions to draw lines.

But when it comes to politics, if you're putting Republicans here and Democrats there, the courts have no business doing that.

Well, again, an awful lot of people, myself included, criticize that heavily because the accomplishment is the same, which is to disenfranchise people, again, based arguably on a different

different set of standards, but nonetheless, it is hugely problematic and it does indeed animate our courts and our practices to this time.

The Louisiana case, which is pending before the Supreme Court, we had one in Alabama, all of these cases are now going off on whether or not the decisions by legislatures to draw the lines as they are, are the product of racial gerrymandering.

or, or political germinating.

So you've got legislators coming forward and saying, listen, yeah, we know it is raw politics that we're doing, but we're okay because the Supreme Court said they won't touch that.

To Mark's point, is that the America that we want?

And shouldn't we adopt, be adopting what they do have in many places, including California, where you've got an independent commission and looking at the lines, looking at population.

once every 10 years, making those decisions based not upon politics, but upon where people live, natural borders, those kinds of things that do in fact result in fair elections and a more representative government in state houses and also in the Congress.

That's the movement that we should all be going to.

We plainly do not have that in America.

And Americans should be unhappy, profoundly unhappy that we're now revisiting all this once again.

And finally, later today, President Trump will be in Alaska, welcoming Vladimir Putin to American soil for a summit, ostensibly to talk about peace, quote unquote, in Ukraine.

I don't believe Ukraine has a voice in the summit, Mark Jacob.

Again, there's a lot of performative rhetoric going on here.

Are we expecting any substance whatsoever?

Is this a Neville Chamberlain thing or he wants to give up part of Ukraine?

Or is he going to give back Alaska while Putin's there?

I mean, anything's possible, right?

Well, you know, I mean, it's shocking that the person who's not there is Zelensky.

I mean, really, you know, so you're going to have a summit on US soil and you're not going to, you're going to carve up somebody else's country.

I mean, it's you know, you you referring to Neville Chamberlain and and the Brits giving away Czechoslovakia is not it's it's apt.

I mean, it's in history You know and history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme and and this is important I'm not expecting much other than for further humiliation of the US on the national on the international stage

I mean, I think back to Helsinki, you know, and how bad Trump looked, you know, and he was repudiating the findings of his own intelligence services in favor of Vladimir Putin.

I mean, that was humiliating.

It should have ended the Trump presidency.

I mean, it was one of the worst moments in U.S.

foreign policy in history.

And so I'm not expecting anything better now, no.

No, and yet, yeah, it's been forgotten by so many.

And then finally, Jim, I mean, it's not going to happen.

But given that Vladimir Putin is, you know, is wanted by what, the International Criminal Court?

Warrants out for his arrest.

Warrants out for his

arrest.

So theoretically, Trump could have that warrant in his pocket and slap some handcuffs on him when he gets off the plane.

I'm not holding my breath for that, but I mean, there are people making the case once he's on US soil, they should find a way to arrest this guy.

You want to enforce the law if you are truly a rule of law president?

Do just that, Mr. President, not going to happen.

But it's not just an academic argument.

It underscores the need for consistency, both domestically and in foreign policy.

Exactly.

You can catch Amicus Law Review with former U.S.

Attorney Jim Santel.

Saturday mornings from 9 to 11, replayed on Sunday on the Civic Media Radio Network.

And of course, Mark Jacob has stopped the presses.

Get it at stopthepresses.news and also read up on him at couriernewsroom.com.

Gentlemen, thanks very much.

You guys and Jennifer will be back next Friday.

Have a great weekend.

Always

a pleasure, Pat.

Take care.

All right.

And Mike Clemens live from Indianapolis in our next hour talking about the Packers preseason game against the Colts coming up next year on the Civic Media Radio Network.

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