Trump’s deployment of Marines in Los Angeles was sold as “complementing law enforcement,” but a federal judge shredded that defense. “Illegal in its conception, illegal in its execution,” David Pepper says — a textbook violation of the ban on using the military for civilian policing. Lisa Senecal notes that even in deep-red states, polls show voters split on these power grabs. The politics are clear: Every spike in authoritarian excess drives independents further away.
The Harvard case exposed the same rot. Trump claimed he was punishing the school for mishandling antisemitism, but his own posts revealed it was retaliation for refusing to bend to his ideology. Pepper calls it “purely lawless bullying,” the kind of state coercion we associate with Viktor Orbán. What makes it more striking is who’s defending Harvard: conservative stalwarts, not left-wing activists. That signals just how blatant the First Amendment violations are — and why these rulings may shape the canon of academic freedom.
On immigration, Trump tried to wield the Alien Enemies Act by redefining “invasion” to mean asylum seekers from Venezuela. Judges combed through the 18th-century text and rejected the ploy outright. David boils it down: “We haven’t been invaded, so we can’t act like we have.” The human stakes sharpen the point — deportation flights that deliver people straight into the arms of the regimes they fled. Courts aren’t just checking abuses; they’re spotlighting how hollow and cruel these legal fictions really are.
Tune in to hear Lisa and David lay out why these cases matter beyond the courtroom — building momentum for democracy, facts, and the refusal to let raw power write its own rules.
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