Even Republicans object as Trump DOJ nominees are disturbingly noncommittal on obeying courts
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What was the federal judge's deadline for the Trump administration?
At the end of last night's show, you might remember we were counting down to a midnight deadline that had been given to the Trump administration by a federal judge. A judge had ordered the Trump administration to restart funding on foreign aid. Now, this is a judge who had previously ordered the Trump administration to restart that funding, and they had not. He had then brought Trump administration lawyers back into his courtroom this week and said, it doesn't seem like you're complying with my earlier order. Can you tell me what steps are being taken to comply with my order? The Trump administration lawyer then responded by basically going, how many, how many, how many, how many, how many, how many?
The judge at that point—we got the transcript, actually. The judge at that point said, quote, Hey, I guess I'm not sure why I can't get a straight answer from you on this. Hey, After that just humiliation of the Trump administration's lawyer unable to explain why the Trump administration was defying this lawful order, that judge issued what's called a motion to enforce. And he set this midnight deadline for midnight last night by which the Trump administration had to do what he said, had to restart that aid funding. So that's what we were talking about last night at the top of the show. And then just as we were going off the air at the end of the show last night, the Trump administration ran to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And just before we went off the air, just before the end of last night's show, the Trump administration obtained an order from the Supreme Court saving them from that midnight deadline. Right. So they're less than three hours away from that deadline. And the Supreme Court at the very last second steps in and says, no, no, no, Trump administration, you don't have to release that funding by midnight after all. And we want briefing on this by noon on Friday. So we'll see what happens by noon on Friday, by tomorrow noon at the U.S. Supreme Court. But because of the Supreme Court's intervention, that USAID funding did not start flowing last night at midnight. And this confrontation and this series of events raises like a whole Niagara Falls of issues and consequences. I mean, first of all, and most importantly, it's the substance of it, right? I mean, what's that funding for?
Well, among other things, it's for the magnificently successful world-renowned U.S. AIDS treatment programs that have been interrupted. That puts tens of millions of lives— at risk. With that funding not flowing, those programs aren't restarting. The new work that is not being done because that funding hasn't restarted includes little things like, I don't know, work on the previously unknown brand new hemorrhagic fever that has just broken out in Congo. It killed three little kids in Congo over the course of three days. And then immediately within like 10 more days, the death toll was 53. And now it's in at least two different locations in Congo, and they don't know what it is or how it spreads. It is a disease they have never seen before. It does seem to have an alarmingly high death rate, something like a 12% death rate, which
For a hemorrhagic fever, an infectious disease is a massive death rate, and even scarier than that, those it kills, it seems to kill within 48 hours, right? This is bad. An outbreak spreading fast of a previously undiscovered, unknown hemorrhagic fever that is already killing humans by the dozens. That's the kind of thing that United States global health programs would be all over, usually, to identify this thing, to contain it, to treat people and keep them alive, to stop this thing from spreading, among other things, to make sure that it does not come here to the United States. But we're not doing the foreign aid funding anymore. Stopping USAID means stopping efforts to combat things like that. It also means, you know... stopping America's traditional and leading and totally irreplaceable work to help and contain the damage when not just hemorrhagic fevers break out, like Ebola in Uganda and Marburg in Tanzania, both of which are happening right now, but also to stop things like tuberculosis and malaria.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
14 identified
Rachel Maddow 31 min
Senator Dick Durbin 3 min
Leo Shane 3 min
Unidentified Reporter 1 min
John Kennedy 1 min
Elliott Spray 1 min
Unidentified Protester 1 min
Unidentified Parent
Unidentified Nominee
Unidentified Supporter
Unidentified Senator
Unidentified Senior Citizen
Unidentified USAID Worker
Unidentified Constituent
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