A county clerk in New York refused Thursday to file a more than $100,000 judgment from Texas against a doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas, setting up a potential challenge to laws designed to shield abortion providers who serve patients in states with abortion bans.

A Texas judge last month ordered Dr. Margaret Carpenter, who practices north of New York City, to pay the penalty for allegedly breaking that state's law by prescribing abortion medication via telemedicine. The Texas attorney general's office followed up last week by asking a New York court to enforce the default civil judgment, which is $113,000 with attorney and filing fees.

The acting Ulster County clerk refused.

“In accordance with the New York State Shield Law, I have refused this filing and will refuse any similar filings that may come to our office. Since this decision is likely to result in further litigation, I must refrain from discussing specific details about the situation," Acting Clerk Taylor Bruck said in a prepared statement.

New York is among eight states with telemedicine shield laws, which were considered a target for abortion opponents even before the standoff between officials New York and Texas.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul last month invoked her state's shield law in rejecting Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s request to extradite Carpenter to Louisiana, where the doctor was charged with prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant minor.

A county clerk in New York refused Thursday to file a more than $100,000 judgment from Texas against a doctor accused of prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas, setting up a potential challenge to laws designed to shield abortion providers who serve patients in states with abortion bans.

A Texas judge last month ordered Dr. Margaret Carpenter, who practices north of New York City, to pay the penalty for allegedly breaking that state's law by prescribing abortion medication via telemedicine. The Texas attorney general's office followed up last week by asking a New York court to enforce the default civil judgment, which is $113,000 with attorney and filing fees.

The acting Ulster County clerk refused.

“In accordance with the New York State Shield Law, I have refused this filing and will refuse any similar filings that may come to our office. Since this decision is likely to result in further litigation, I must refrain from discussing specific details about the situation," Acting Clerk Taylor Bruck said in a prepared statement.

New York is among eight states with telemedicine shield laws, which were considered a target for abortion opponents even before the standoff between officials New York and Texas.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul last month invoked her state's shield law in rejecting Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s request to extradite Carpenter to Louisiana, where the doctor was charged with prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant minor.

GREENLAND (The Borowitz Report)—On Thursday the government of Greenland flatly rejected Donald J. Trump’s offer to trade Vice President JD Vance for a stake in the island’s rare earth minerals.

In a strongly worded rebuke, government spokesman Hartvig Dorkelson declared, “Greenland will consider any attempt to transfer ownership of JD Vance to this island to be an act of war.”

Greenland’s statement drew an impassioned response from the VP’s wife, Usha Vance, who urged the island’s government to reconsider Trump’s offer.

“I strongly recommend that you agree to this deal,” she said. “We’re not even insisting on the minerals part.”

This week's events offer a timely reminder: When a White House Cabinet is filled with unqualified amateurs, dangerous consequences are inevitable.

(Come for the analysis, stay for the prescient point @mattyglesias.bsky.social made in 2017.)

Two months into his second term, Donald Trump’s White House Cabinet is just about full, with the Republican-led Senate confirming each of the president’s nominees. But as NBC News reported, the public doesn’t seem overly impressed.

A majority of American voters are generally disappointed with the people President Donald Trump has appointed to posts in his administration, according to an NBC News poll earlier this month — a record share in a question NBC News has measured at the start of four previous administrations.

It’s important to emphasize that the poll was conducted before the public learned that the White House’s national security team chatted in a Signal group about the sensitive operational details of a military strike in Yemen — potentially in violation of some federal laws — after they accidentally included Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, in their unsecured online conversation.

Even without this knowledge, 52% of Americans said they were “generally disappointed with the people Trump had appointed to lead federal agencies and departments” — the worst support for a Cabinet in the 21st century.

The survey results are notable, but they’re also a timely reminder of an underappreciated point: White House Cabinet agencies and their leaders matter, and when departments are led by unqualified amateurs, dangerous consequences are inevitable......

The result was an administration that failed countless governing tests. Senate Republicans, driven by partisan loyalties, thought they were helping the president by confirming his unqualified first-term choices, but no one, including Trump, benefited when the administration struggled in tasks large and small.

In the president’s second term, the problem doesn’t just persist, it’s actually worse, as Trump surrounds himself with more Cabinet secretaries who show loyalty to him personally but who are manifestly ill-suited to oversee powerful federal departments and agencies.

The scandal known as “Signalgate” has brought this into sharp relief, and in the coming months, there's no reason to believe the systemic problem will get any better.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to preserve the contents of the chat in which top national security officials used the Signal app to discuss military strikes in Yemen as they were taking place earlier this month.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the top cabinet officials named in a lawsuit by the government transparency group American Oversight to retain any messages sent and received over Signal between March 11 and March 15.

Benjamin Sparks, a lawyer representing American Oversight, raised concerns that "these messages are imminent danger of destruction" due to settings within Signal that can be set to delete messages automatically -- prompting Judge Boasberg to order the Trump administration file a sworn declaration by this Monday to ensure the messages are preserved.

The lawsuit -- which names Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the National Archives as defendants -- asked a federal judge to declare the use of Signal unlawful and order the cabinet members to preserve the records immediately, as Signal's deleting of messages violates governmental record-keeping requirements.

When the Trump Justice Department moved to disqualify U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell from the Perkins Coie law firm case last week, I noted that there’s a high bar for such motions and that Howell would likely reject the attempt. She did so Wednesday, in a scathing ruling that said the government’s argument was “rife with innuendo” but that “none of the claims put forward come close to meeting the standard for disqualification.”

The DOJ filed the disqualification motion after Howell issued a temporary restraining order against one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting firms he doesn’t like. Litigation is set to continue on the Perkins Coie matter in Howell’s court in Washington, D.C., but after losing on the restraining order, the government wants a new judge. The disqualification motion argued that the Obama appointee “has repeatedly demonstrated partiality against and animus towards the President” in past cases as well as this one.

But Howell observed, citing Supreme Court precedent on recusals, that “mere disagreements with the prior legal rulings of this Court do not ‘constitute a valid basis’ for disqualification.”....

To be sure, trying to disqualify a judge in court is a legally permissible endeavor. But in calling a high-profile judge’s fairness toward the president into question based on rulings in politically potent cases, it inevitably straddles the political sphere. Indeed, responding to a line from the DOJ’s motion that stressed “the need to curtail ongoing improper encroachments of President Trump’s Executive Power playing out around the country,” Howell wrote that it “sounds like a talking point from a member of Congress rather than a legal brief from the United States Department of Justice.”

True enough. But the DOJ probably didn’t write that line to win Howell over. That doesn’t mean the motion was solely a “political” writing even if it was never going to succeed — at least not at the trial level. In fact, the administration has pressed several appeals to the Supreme Court in which it has adopted a similar framing of stubborn trial judges unduly impeding the Trump agenda. On the judicial front, then, the justices might be the DOJ’s ultimate audience — though, so far, even that audience hasn’t been too receptive to the administration’s efforts.

Given all of this, it stands to reason that Donald Trump would be up to speed on the details and the status of the search for the American service members. He is, after all, the president and the commander in chief of the armed forces. And yet, HuffPost noted:

Donald Trump appeared unaware on Wednesday that four U.S. soldiers had gone missing during a NATO training exercise in Lithuania. When asked by a reporter if he had been briefed on the situation that began to unfurl hours before, the president replied, “No, I haven’t.”

He didn’t elaborate. In fact, the president simply moved on to another question.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3llcri5hhvg2b
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1905017297892258146

......Taken together, it’s difficult not to wonder just how out of the loop the president is in his own White House.

Five years ago this month, as the severity of the pandemic came into focus, The New York Times published a memorable analysis that included a word to describe Trump that stood out for me as significant: “bystander.”

“While he presents himself as the nation’s commanding figure, Mr. Trump has essentially become a bystander as school superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners across the country take it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president,” the Times explained.

A half-decade later, it appears President Bystander has returned. Trump has taken a keen interest in playing golf, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, banning paper straws, watching an enormous amount of television and helping steer the Kennedy Center — but on life-or-death issues, he’s offering the public a lot of shrugged shoulders and blank stares.

For a president who’s heavily invested in the idea that his immediate predecessor had no idea what was going on around him, Trump’s apparent cluelessness should be a serious problem.

How can you tell White House officials are struggling with "Signalgate"?

They think a weird semantics fight over the meaning of "war plans" is a persuasive political winner.

Nevertheless, Donald Trump’s operation can’t simply remain silent in response to the controversy, and the White House needed some kind of defense. So, on Day 3 of the “Signalgate” debacle, the administration settled on, and leaned into, a hyper-specific semantics argument: The Signal group chat did not include literal “war plans.” As The New York Times summarized:

The White House effort to defend Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday leaned heavily into a semantic argument. What he posted on the now-infamous Signal chat with his national security colleagues, Mr. Hegseth and other administration officials insist, was not a ‘war plan.’

To an almost cartoonish degree, many of Team Trump’s most prominent — and in this instance, most relevant — voices have simultaneously pushed the same line. The leaked chat did not include “war plans,” Hegseth told reporters. White House National Security Advisor Mike Waltz added via social media, “NO WAR PLANS.”

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote online, “[T]hese were NOT ‘war plans,’” and added during a White House briefing that an unidentified “they” are “playing word games.”
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:iu4j537hox5huj4bwnwgub4z/post/3llccmieund2b
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1904948121072971880

......“1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package),” Hegseth told his colleagues in the chat. “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME) — also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s).” At one point, the beleaguered Pentagon chief also wrote, “THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP.”

Whether one is inclined to describe this as “war plan,” an “attack plan” or a detailed “battle plan” for a deadly military operation, at issue is a distinction without a difference.

The fact that this is apparently the one talking point the White House is clinging to is emblematic of the scandal’s seriousness and the challenges Republicans are facing to downplay its importance.

Donald Trump told Fox News earlier this month that he intended to use the power of his office to go after several prominent law firms. Evidently, he was serious. NBC News reported on the president’s latest move against the legal profession.

Trump signed an executive order [Tuesday] punishing a law firm that hired Andrew Weissmann, a Trump critic who was a prosecutor on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election. The order directs that employees of the firm Jenner & Block be stripped of security clearances and have their access to federal buildings limited and that federal agencies terminate any contracts with the firm.

,,,,,There’s no great mystery behind the motivation. The single great obstacle between Trump and his radical goals is not Congress. It’s not public opinion. It’s not norms or traditional institutional constraints. It’s not shame or fear of embarrassment.

It’s the courts — or more to the point, opponents of his agenda who’ve filed suit and brought their concerns to the courts, where the White House has been losing a lot over the last several weeks.

In response, the president, his team and their allies have launched an extraordinary political offensive intended to smear judges and undermine the integrity of the federal judiciary, but that campaign is only half of the equation. The other half is focused on bringing some of the nation’s largest law firms to heel.

Deborah Pearlstein, a visiting professor of law and public affairs at Princeton and the director of the university’s Program in Law and Public Policy, wrote for The New York Times, “Of all of the American legal institutions now facing sustained attack, none would seem better positioned to push back against Mr. Trump’s strongman tactics than this class of wealthy and politically connected firms, known collectively as Big Law. Counsel to the world’s most powerful corporations, they are engaged in every sector of the marketplace and central to ensuring that the United States and global economy continue to spin. Yet where many ordinary judges, law school deans and public interest attorneys of both political parties have found the courage to push back against Mr. Trump’s anti-constitutional histrionics, Big Law has largely stayed silent or worse.”

It’s not too late for the firms to put a fight. Whether they want to remains to be seen.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Defending his decision to use an insecure messaging app to discuss classified war plans, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said on Wednesday that he chose Signal because it offered more emojis.

“Those sleazebags at The Atlantic are acting like using Signal is some kind of scandal,” Waltz said. “You want to know a real scandal? The government spent billions of dollars on a secure communications system that has zero emojis.”

Waltz said that he refused to use the government’s system when it became clear to him that it lacked even rudimentary emojis like fist, fire, and smiley face.

“I stand by my decision to use Signal,” he said. “When you’re planning to bomb another country, an emoji is worth a thousand OMGs and LOLs.”