Originally published at: Trump Alludes to Ominous Plans When Asked About ICE At the Polls
While administration officials went from side-stepping the question to openly embracing the potential that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers might be being deployed (illegally) to polling places in November, President Trump himself has yet to speak on the topic — whether by design, as ICE’s popularity plummeted earlier this year, or not. On Tuesday, Trump…
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ICE at the polls will go over like a fart in a space suit. And it won’t help the American Nazi (I mean Republican) Party.
I am hopeful that the redistricting effort will blow up in their faces; it won’t create extra votes, and might discourage the ones they need while energizing the opposition.
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Too many polling places, not enough ICE. And the usual response that they’ll concentrate on important swing states in Blue cities, runs into state governors and mayors who won’t put up with bullshit. It’s illegal under federal law for them to be anywhere near a polling place. The midterms may even be decided by mail-in votes. Thousands of Dem eyes will be on this.
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OT? Great (Important) Read
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Okay - I went DEEP on this - and I want everyone to PAY ATTENTION.
There will be a test.
So one network had two huge wins this week and the guy at the center of it isn’t getting named in either story.
Have you heard of Leonard Leo? The Federalist Society guy. The one who helped build the current conservative Supreme Court majority and advised Trump on who to put on it, then went off to do bigger stuff.
On April 29 the conservative Supreme Court majority he helped build handed down what voting-rights advocates say is the biggest rollback of the Voting Rights Act in decades.
On May 4 the Department of Education opened a federal civil rights investigation into Smith College for admitting trans women. Totally different fights. Totally different agencies. Totally different legal frameworks. Nobody putting them in the same story.
But the same $1.6 billion dark money network is sitting behind both of them.
I had to dig into this one because honestly when the Smith news dropped I thought it was just another Trump trans panic move. Standard culture war stuff. Then I saw the complaint came from a group called Defending Education, and the name rang a bell from the parental rights school board stuff a couple years ago, and I started pulling on the thread.
Defending Education is run by Nicole Neily. She’s a Koch network lifer - Cato, FreedomWorks, Competitive Enterprise Institute, all the usual suspects. The group says it’s grassroots moms, which, lol.
According to IRS filings summarized by SourceWatch, the group paid Leonard Leo’s PR firm CRC Advisors $1,392,656 between 2021 and 2024 for “strategy” and “public relations.” Their legal work runs through Consovoy McCarthy, a firm that has worked extensively on conservative civil rights cases. Neily’s other nonprofit, Speech First, got $750,000 from Leo’s 85 Fund.
So Leo’s nonprofit hub gives money to one Neily group, and a different Neily group pays Leo’s for-profit firm. The money goes in a circle. The “grassroots parents” are a pass-through.
So when “a parents group” filed the Smith complaint, that’s not a parents group. That’s a Leo-network-aligned operation using a friendlier brand name.
OK let me explain how the money actually works because once you see it you can’t unsee it.
In 2022 an Illinois businessman named Barre Seid gave $1.6 billion to a Leo entity called Marble Freedom Trust. Largest political donation in American history.
That money flows from Marble through a donor-advised fund at Schwab Charitable, which then grants it to Leo’s main funding hubs, the 85 Fund and the Concord Fund.
Those funds then grant it out to all the nonprofits doing the actual fights - judicial groups, parents groups, election groups, “free speech” groups.
Schwab in the middle is the anonymity layer. When the 85 Fund’s tax return says “we got our money from Schwab Charitable,” nobody can trace it back to Marble, which means nobody can trace it back to Seid. The donors stay anonymous.
A significant amount of Leo-network nonprofit money has flowed back to Leo’s own for-profit firm CRC Advisors - over $100 million since 2020, according to Court Accountability’s Lisa Graves. He owns three houses now including a $3.3 million Tudor in Maine that he paid cash for in 2021. The network’s nonprofit money also flows into his private consulting operation.
That’s the machine. Now the wins.
Win one is Callais. The case was about a Louisiana map that restored a second majority-Black district and led to the election of a second Black representative. A group of “non-African American” voters sued to kill the map. Alito wrote the 6-3 opinion holding the map was unconstitutional and substantially narrowed how racial-gerrymandering claims can be brought going forward. Critics say the ruling shifts the fight toward proving intentional racial discrimination, making Section 2 claims much harder to win.
Kagan in the dissent said it makes Section 2 “all but a dead letter.”
The conservative majority that wrote that opinion came through the judicial pipeline Leo helped build.
And the response was immediate.
Tennessee pulled off the most aggressive move. The day after Callais, Trump posted that Governor Bill Lee was going to redraw Tennessee’s map. Lee called a special session two days later.
The session opened May 5. On May 7 the legislature repealed a 1972 state law that had banned mid-decade redistricting for fifty years, passed an entirely new congressional map that carves Memphis into three pieces, eliminates the state’s only majority-Black district, and pushes toward a 9-0 Republican delegation.
Lee signed it all into law. Same day.
The NAACP filed a lawsuit within three hours.
They repealed a fifty-year-old law and passed a brand new map in three days. You don’t draw a map like that in a weekend. You don’t repeal a fifty-year-old statute in a weekend. Somebody had this ready.
Alabama filed an emergency request the day after Callais to bring back maps a lower court had already thrown out for being racially gerrymandered. Florida started redistricting immediately. Three Republican states moving in the same week, with more lining up behind them.
Win two is Smith.
Smith College is a 155-year-old women’s college in western Massachusetts. The kind of place that shows up in old movies as a stand-in for “smart, slightly intimidating young women in cardigans.” They’ve been admitting trans women since 2015, which is to say, for over a decade, on the simple logic that a women’s college admits people who identify as women. Nobody outside the school cared. It wasn’t a fight.
Then last spring Smith handed an honorary degree to Rachel Levine. You might remember Levine. She’s the trans former Assistant Secretary for Health under Biden, the first openly trans federal official ever confirmed by the Senate, and basically Trumpworld’s favorite person to put in attack ads. The Trump campaign featured her face in ads going after Kamala in 2024. Right’s been obsessed with her for years.
Smith invited her to commencement. Gave her a degree. That was the trigger.
Defending Education - Nicole Neily’s group, the one running money in a circle with Leonard Leo - filed a complaint with the Department of Education. On May 4, the Trump administration opened a federal civil rights investigation into Smith for, and I’m quoting here, “admitting biological men and granting them access to women-only spaces, including dormitories, bathrooms, locker rooms, and athletic teams.”
The “victims” in the complaint are “biological women” who somehow got harmed by Smith admitting trans women. There are no actual women being denied admission. Smith takes any applicant who identifies as a woman, period. There’s no named student who came forward saying their rights were violated. No incident. No event. Just a policy that exists, and the possibility that someday, maybe, somebody could feel like their rights got taken away.
That’s the move. Sue over something that has not happened to anyone. Get the precedent before the harm exists, so by the time anyone could have actually been harmed, the door is already closed.
We’ve seen this play before. The clearest example is 303 Creative, the Colorado web designer who sued for the right to refuse to make wedding websites for same-sex couples. She had never been asked to make a wedding website for a same-sex couple. She did not have a wedding website business. The “request” she cited in her court filing turned out to be from a guy who was straight, already married to a woman, and had never contacted her.
The Supreme Court ruled in her favor anyway, 6-3, and carved a First Amendment loophole into public accommodations law over a customer who did not exist.
Now look at what the Trump administration is doing with executive orders. Designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization with no specific act tied to a specific person. Deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act based on tattoos that might indicate gang membership. The whole pre-crime architecture, where you get punished for what the government thinks you might do, not what you did.
The Smith investigation is the same logic applied to civil rights enforcement. Stop waiting for harm. Open the case on the possibility of harm. Let the threat of losing federal funding do the work of forcing the school to change its policy before anyone has actually been hurt by anything.
Listen. I’ve written about Leo before, mostly the climate cases - his network funds the lawsuits while ProPublica documents him paying for the justices’ vacations. The Smith case is the same playbook in a new costume. The lawyers are there. The plaintiffs are pre-built. The PR is pre-positioned. The federal agencies are now staffed by people from the same conservative legal world.
Leo’s network isn’t waiting for harm. They’re manufacturing the precedent in advance. Callais was queued for years. The Smith complaint sat at the DOE for ten months. Tennessee passed a brand new map and repealed a fifty-year-old law in three days. Alabama filed the day after Callais. None of this was improvised. They’re firing on all cylinders.
The press will cover Callais as a voting rights story and Smith as a trans story and nobody is going to put them in the same paragraph. But the donor map does. The money runs in a circle and the circle includes both fights.
If you’re a Black voter in Louisiana watching your district disappear, and you’re a trans student at Smith watching the federal government try to throw you out of your school, you don’t have the same enemy on paper. You have the exact same enemy on the bank statements.
And if you’re on the left and you’ve been watching this from the sidelines wondering why we keep losing, the answer is simple.
They’ve been planning all of this for decades. Now, they show up to every fight with the lawyers, the plaintiffs, the PR, the donors, and the federal agencies already lined up.
Time to stop watching and start taking notes.
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Hopefully the Dems and other GOTV and activist orgs. can make lemonade from the “ICE at polling places” lemons. Treat election day as a kind of No Kings event, with showing up to vote as a “f#@k your gestapo” protest. I’d be up for it.
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Translation: If I’m impeached and removed from office I could face prosecution. I don’t want to have my lifelong, scot-free crime-spree ruined by dying in jail.
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this supposed election integrity team
Financed by small donations from voters…lol …Just kidding.
The Republican Party is part of a vast, right-wing network conspiring against the democratic values of America.
Remember, states run elections. The feds have no role.
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Edited for accuracy.
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Now that I’m officially working the election in my MN town, I have to wonder how much controversy will be where I am.
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Are there conspiracy to deny constitutional/civil rights charges/indictments embedded in this set of facts? IANAL, so asking for myself hoping for a knowledgeable answer.
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So, Hon. should we summit Everest this year or do something really challenging?
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(45) The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance - Paul Krugman
All of this was predictable and predicted
The so-called experts ridiculed Donald Trump’s claims during the 2024 campaign that he would bring grocery prices down on Day One and cut energy prices in half.
The so-called experts said that Trump’s tariffs would raise consumer prices while failing to bring back manufacturing jobs.
The so-called experts said that Trump appointee Pete Hegseth’s emphasis on “warrior ethos” rather than competence and his purge of officers he doesn’t consider sufficiently loyal to Trump would degrade the U.S. military and be disastrous in a war.
The so-called experts warned that Trump’s attack on Iran would lead us into a quagmire and cause a global energy crisis.
The so-called experts said that Trump’s contempt for international agreements and his threats to friendly nations would undermine the world’s trust in America, and that we would find ourselves without allies when we needed their help.
The so-called experts were completely right.
Right now inflation is surging; manufacturing employment is down; the Strait of Hormuz remains closed; and Trump is traveling to Beijing as a supplicant, in effect begging China for help getting out of his Iran mess.
But it would be foolish to expect Trump and his minions to learn anything from their humiliation.
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It is very possible that their extreme redistricting efforts will blow up in their faces (although not in a way to offset the whitewashing of House representation after Callais). When it does blow up, however, it will also energize their ‘election integrity’ efforts to interfere with and challenge the results. Continued vigilance will be required, following up on diligent efforts to register voters and get out the vote.
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“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
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Thank you for this. Every now and then I muse about the silence around Leonard Leo, and wonder exactly what nefarious abuses he’s up to at the moment that no one has noticed… knowing full well the answer is not ‘nothing’.
The ongoing war on women’s reproductive life and health (because Dobbs was not enough) is of a piece with this corrupt legal campaign. It may not be funded by Leo’s organization, but the playbook is exactly the same.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.
Wendell Phillips, 1852.
The condition on which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.
John Philpot Curran, 1790.
We’ve slacked off on the job.
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1984 was not a User’s Guide to Politics.
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It would be foolish to expect MAGA to learn anything from their humiliation. Hell, they don’t even know they’ve been humiliated.
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As a provocation to Austria, host of the Eurovision Song Contest this year, Hegseth has ordered provocative incursions of Austrian airspace by US jets ostensibly because Hegseth is cheesed over Austria’s decision to close its airspace to the US since the start of the Iran War. He needs a Dance Permit.