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authoritarianism
'Should Send a Chill Down the Spine of Every American': Trump DOJ Charges New Jersey Democrat
"The most corrupt administration in our country's history is targeting and punishing public officials who seek to hold them accountable."
May 20, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's Justice Department announced Monday that it is pursuing assault charges against a Democratic congresswoman from New Jersey who took part in an oversight visit at a privately run migrant detention center in Newark earlier this month.
In a statement, Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Alina Habba announced the charges against U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), claiming the lawmaker "assaulted, impeded, and interfered with law enforcement" at GEO Group's Delaney Hall. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded GEO Group a billion-dollar contract earlier this year to detain migrants there, even as the facility faced legal challenges and accusations of abuse.
McIver rejected the charges against her as "purely political," saying that "they mischaracterize and distort my actions" in an attempt to "criminalize and deter legislative oversight."
"We were fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities, as members of Congress have done many times before, and our visit should have been peaceful and short," said McIver. "Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor [Ras] Baraka."
Habba said Monday that her office has agreed to drop the trespassing charge against Baraka, who welcomed the decision while expressing solidarity with McIver.
"Congresswoman McIver is a daughter of Newark, past Newark Council president, a former student of mine, and a dear friend," said Baraka. "I want to be clear: I stand with LaMonica, and I fully expect her to be vindicated."
"It reveals the increasingly authoritarian nature of this administration and its relentless, illegal attempts to suppress any dissent or oversight."
The U.S. attorney's announcement sparked an outpouring of support for McIver and grave warnings about the implications of the Trump administration's attempt to prosecute her and other officials who try to stand in the way of its lawless mass deportation effort.
"This is a clear political attack on Rep. LaMonica McIver for having the courage to stand up to Trump's abuses of power," said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. "Let's be clear who the real lawbreakers are. In just the last week, both Donald Trump and [Attorney General] Pam Bondi have been caught with a hand in the cookie jar. Bondi sold millions of shares of stock on the same day that Trump announced his disastrous tariffs. And Trump accepted a $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari royal family."
"The most corrupt administration in our country's history is targeting and punishing public officials who seek to hold them accountable," Mitchell added.
McIver's fellow congressional Democrats also rallied to her defense.
Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) called the charges a "purely political act" and said that "oversight is not a criminal offense unless you are living under a fascist regime."
The chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), said that "the baseless charges against Congresswoman McIver for simply doing her job should send a chill down the spine of every American."
A group of Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee warned that "charging members of Congress for doing our jobs is a dangerous precedent to set."
"It reveals the increasingly authoritarian nature of this administration and its relentless, illegal attempts to suppress any dissent or oversight, including from judges, members of Congress, and the American people, which check lawless executive power," the lawmakers said. "Representative McIver has our full support, and we will do everything in our power to help fight this outrageous threat to our constitutional system."
The scene at Delaney Hall earlier this month was highly chaotic, with video footage showing jostling and heated verbal exchanges outside of the facility's gate as federal agents moved to arrest Baraka after three New Jersey lawmakers—McIver and Reps. Robert Menendez and Bonnie Watson Coleman—visited the inside of the detention center, which they have a right to do under federal law.
The Department of Homeland Security released a video claiming to show McIver "assaulting" an ICE agent, and one DHS official accused the Democratic lawmaker of "body-slamming" and "body-ramming" officers. McIver, who rejected the claims, said at the time that federal agents at the scene were "roughing up members of Congress."
Watson Coleman, who is 80 years old, said she was "manhandled" by ICE agents as they moved to arrest Baraka.
In a statement late Monday, Mike Zamore of the national ACLU and Amol Sinha of ACLU-NJ said that "the Trump administration's political charges against Congresswoman McIver [are] a method more suited for authoritarianism than American democracy."
"If the Trump administration can target elected officials who oppose its extreme agenda, it can happen to any one of us," they said. "We demand that they drop the charges against Rep. McIver, and we implore her fellow members of Congress to call for the same."
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We Need a Coffee Party to Waken the People Being Strip-Mined by Dangerous Donald
As the marches, rallies, and town meetings swell, the demand that Trump be fired will boost popular support for his Impeachment and removal from office.
May 17, 2025
Dictator Donald Trump’s ego has gone global and dominates the news cycle. His domestic opponents are left with too little too late rebuttals and, again, are victims of his genius in diverting and distracting them and the media.
Take his “triumphant” trip to the wealthy Arab Nations in the Gulf. Their rulers flattered him 24/7 as the boss of the world while he flattered them in return for their business deals (some benefitting him and his family) and arms purchases. Trump enjoys being in charge. But he wasn’t.
Before, during, and after his trip, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remained his MASTER on the matters that count to the Israeli perpetrator of genocide. Trump said nothing serious about a cease-fire; nothing about opening the border to Gaza to thousands of waiting trucks (paid for by the U.S. taxpayer) carrying food, water, medicine, and other critical necessities for the starving, dying, besieged Palestinians in Gaza; nothing about the demands that Netanyahu lift his ban on American and other Israeli and foreign reporters going independently into Gaza.
The Democrats have failed to mobilize their voters into a powerful grassroots force or even encourage their partisans to do so on their own.
The media interpreted his skipping visiting Israel as a snub when it really was a clever way to avoid facing up to Netanyahu, especially for breaking the January cease-fire that Trump took credit for, and starting the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. Trump took Netanyahu breaking “his truce” as an affront to his famous ego by cowardly shutting his mouth.
To further favor Netanyahu and his U.S. domestic Lobby, Trump told the new president of war-torn Syria to make peace with Israel and join the Abraham Accords, negotiated by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. At the same time, Israel is using American-made F-16s to bomb Syria (without provocation) hundreds of times while seizing more and more of powerless Syria’s territory!
Domestically, Trump every day boasts about MAGA as he is Wrecking America. Simultaneously, second thoughts are seeping into his MAGA crowd and among the “Amen” sycophants that make up the GOP in Congress. They’re starting to say, in so many words, “Hey, we didn’t vote for this or that.”
Now Trump, aside from his delusionary rhetoric, is playing a Zig Zag game which indicates he senses when he is going off the cliff. His polls are dropping slowly and will drop further when the tariff-induced prices start climbing and the economy signals the dreaded stagflation on the horizon.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party and its so-called leadership is still backing and filling, despite powerful demands at packed Town Meetings in their Districts for their members of Congress to be “comprehensively aggressive,” as one Democratic voter put it.
First, they need to consult the dictionary so that they can discover the words that fit Tyrant Trump and the poisonous tusks of Felon Musk. Political cowards have trouble using plain, strong language to depict Trump’s fascist dictatorship moving into police state seizures of innocent people for using their freedom of speech.
They can learn from some of their predecessors like underdog Harry Truman in his 1948 presidential race with poll-favored Thomas Dewey. Here is “Give ’em hell Harry” speaking to 90,000 farmers and their families in a field in Dexter, Iowa:
I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head before you find out who’s hitting you?… These Republican gluttons of privilege are cold men. They are cunning men… They want a return of the Wall Street economic dictatorship… I’m not asking you just to vote for me. Vote for yourselves!
When Trump, in 2016, started using MAGA as his constant slogan, the Democratic Party paid a consultant to later come up with the yawn-inducing slogan: “Build Back Better.” Kamala Harris used “the opportunity economy” as her catchphrase instead of the electric rhetoric and kitchen table agenda of Bernie Sanders—still the most popular politician in America.
Trump gives the Democrats so many unexploited opportunities. Three examples:
First, the Dems have missed making a big deal out of Trump and Musk shielding the biggest sources of their alleged interest in “rooting out waste, fraud, and inefficiency” in the executive branch. They do not touch “corporate crime” ripping off Medicare, Medicaid, et al. for tens of billions of dollars yearly, or huge amounts of corporate subsidies, giveaways, brazen tax dodges, and the bloated, unauditable military budget that Trump wants to increase by $100 billion more than requested by the generals.
Second, he keeps shouting “impeach,” the judges who cross him. The Democrats should return the favor by filing Impeachment articles in the House against Trump (See: the 22 Impeachable Offenses). Instead the so-called Democratic Party leaders are clamping down on the tiny number of House Democrats who want to do just that.
Third, the Democrats have failed to mobilize their voters into a powerful grassroots force or even encourage their partisans to do so on their own, as did the “Tea Party” in 2009 against Barack Obama. (Call it the “Coffee Party” to waken the population—liberal and conservative working families—both strip-mined by the plutocrat-oligarch Dangerous Donald.)
Trump recently bloviated “I Run the Country and the World.” The “Coffee Party” masses can focus all their growing pain and suffering from Trumpism with the outcry he well understands: “YOU’RE FIRED.” (See my recent column: “YOU’RE FIRED!” –GROWING MILLIONS OF AMERICANS ARE REJECTING TRUMP.)
As the marches, rallies, and town meetings swell, the demand that Trump be fired will boost popular support for his Impeachment and removal from office, as happened with Richard Nixon in 1974 for far lesser transgressions. “Impossible,” you say? Not when the congressional Republicans see the polls and economic recession dragging their sagging political future for 2026 by continuing their allegiance to Trump.
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After Thanedar Backs Off, Green Files New Article of Impeachment Against Trump
Rep. Al Green of Texas accused Trump of "flouting of federal court orders, flouting the separation of powers, undermining the independence of the federal judiciary, and flouting the constitutional mandate of due process."
May 16, 2025
After Democratic Michigan Rep. Shri Thanedar earlier this week opted not to move forward with an effort to force the U.S. House of Representatives to vote on impeaching U.S. President Donald Trump, another lawmaker on Thursday filed a single article of impeachment against Trump, calling him a threat to democracy.
In a Thursday statement, Rep. Al Green of Texas, a Democrat, said that he "announced on the floor of the House of Representatives that I have filed H.Res.415 to impeach President Donald John Trump for condoning the flouting of federal court orders, flouting the separation of powers, undermining the independence of the federal judiciary, and flouting the constitutional mandate of due process."
In a letter, Green elaborated that he felt compelled to move forward with the impeachment push because he cannot "in good conscience... wait until the next election to deal with authoritarian President Donald John Trump's pre-election threat to American democracy that has become a post-election assault on our government."
Green's article of impeachment alleges that Trump is "devolving democracy within the United States into authoritarianism with himself (Donald John Trump) as an authoritarian president."
His resolution states that through Trump's conduct and his "violation" of the presidential oath of office, in which the president swears to "faithfully execute the office of president of the United States" and to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States" in accordance with Article II, Section I of the U.S. Constitution, he has "engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors."
In his letter, Green said that he would "call for a vote to impeach authoritarian President Donald John Trump at a time to be determined."
This year, Green has repeatedly expressed his intention to file articles of impeachment against Trump.
Green was censured earlier this year after disrupting Trump's joint address to Congress, heckling the president and telling him he had "no mandate to cut Medicaid."
Thanedar, who last month filed seven articles of impeachment against Trump, backed off from forcing a vote after Democrats privately worried that it would distract from efforts to highlight potential cuts to Medicaid and other programs as part of the Republican megabill currently making it ways through Congress, according to Politico. Publicly, Thenader said he was holding off after speaking with colleagues and that he intends to add to the impeachment articles.
The group Free Speech for People, which is mounting a campaign to drum up support for impeaching Trump again, boosted both Thanedar and Green's impeachment pushes on social media.
Trump was impeached twice by the House of Representatives during his first term, but in both cases he was acquitted by the Senate. Both chambers of Congress are now controlled by Trump's Republican Party.
In response to Green's resolution, the White House assistant press secretary told the Houston Chronicle, in part, on Friday: "Every action taken by President Trump and his administration is fully lawful and firmly rooted in the will of the American people. President Trump is doing exactly what he promised: securing our border, bringing in trillions of dollars in investment to America, and restoring common sense leadership."
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