Transcript
Alison Gill (0:00)
MSW Media. Hello and welcome to the Daily beans for Friday, June 6, 2025. Today, the Trump Musk feud explodes on their social media platforms as Musk calls for Trump's impeachment and threatens to release information about Donald and Epstein. The CDC's top COVID vaccine advisor has resigned since RFK Jr said he'd remove Covid from the vaccine schedules. A federal judge has ordered the reinstatement of the AmeriCorps program in 24 states. Trump has reinstated an expanded travel ban that includes 19 countries. He also blocked international students from studying at Harvard and settled a six hour long lawsuit suit with himself. In Texas, Trump officials delayed a report of farm trade data over deficit forecasts. The Supreme Court sides with a straight white woman claiming reverse discrimination. And four states have petitioned the FDA to lift abortion pill restrictions. I'm your host, Alison Gill. Hello. Hello. Happy Friday, everyone. Holy majoli. It's been a day for anyone with a social media account. Trump and Musk were at each other's throats today, and I for one, am enjoying this immensely. I know, I know it's probably a distraction from something else, but we are all pretty well informed about everything else that's going on, and it is a really fun distraction. So Elon said Trump won't release the Epstein files because he's in them, which we knew. And then Trump said Elon had Trump derangement syndrome. And. And then Elon said Trump should be impeached. And then Trump said he would rescind Elon's government contracts. Then Musk said he was going to decommission his dragon spaceship. And then Musk even said he won the election for Trump. Then he won the House for Republicans and a couple of Republican senators too. So that was quite specific with the numbers that he gave. Alex Jones is flipping out. Bannon is calling for Trump to deport Musk. And meanwhile, Tesla lost 154 billion billion with a B dollars in value today. Today alone. But women are too emotional, right? So we're going to talk about all that and more with Sean Fugelsang later in the show because it's Fugal sang Friday on the Daily Beans. And I'm going to be speaking with the first openly gay congresswoman from The south, representing Texas 32, Congresswoman Julie Johnson. Dana's out today. She'll be back Monday. She's out raising money for the LGBTQ community and Lambda Legal. So we love to support her while she's doing that. We, we have so much to cover today. So let's hit the hot notes. Hot notes all right, first up from the post. A top coronavirus vaccine advisor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has resigned, citing concerns that she could no longer help vulnerable people after federal health officials rescinded long standing recommendations to immunize children and pregnant women. Lakshmi Panagiokopoulos, I hope I'm saying that right. It's a very long last name, so please forgive me if I'm mispronouncing it. She said in an email to colleagues Tuesday that she made a personal decision to quit the CDC after 12 years. Quote, My career in public health and vaccinology started with a deep seated desire to help the most vulnerable members of our population, and that is not something I'm able to continue doing in this role. That's what she wrote, according to a copy obtained by the Post. She said she made her decision Friday. Her email didn't further detail her reasons for leaving, but I think that's enough. It came days after the Health and human services secretary, RFK Jr. And other health agency leaders said they would stop recommending coronavirus shots for healthy children and pregnant women. Next up from NBC. Anger and condemnation broke out as families and attorneys and immigrant advocates absorbed the blast from the latest bombshell delivered by the Trump administration, a travel ban that stops or restricts People from 19 mostly African, Asian and Caribbean countries from entering the United States. While the Trump administration said the travel ban is meant to keep Americans safe, critics lobbed accusations of discrimination, cruelty, racism, inhumanity and more in response. Meanwhile, the news also elicited confusion over what will happen once the ban goes into effect this Monday. Now, Trump's proclamation issued Wednesday night bans people from 12 countries from traveling to the United States, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. And in seven more countries, travel to the US Is suspended but not banned, and that's Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. Now, it took three tries for Trump in his previous administration to come up with a travel ban that the Supreme Court would accept. Lower courts nixed the first version, and the administration kept revising it until the high court accepted the third version in June of 2018. Immigration and Civil rights groups opposed all three versions. Raha Walla, vice president of strategy and partnership at the National Immigration Law center, said that challenging the latest ban will be an uphill battle because the Supreme Court decision is the law of the land. Edward CIA, an immigration attorney in New York City, said that blocking the latest ban will be tougher now than it was in 2017, quote, Trump got smarter this time, he said, explaining that this mix of countries makes it harder to argue that the ban is discriminatory. Next up from the Times. Trump said Wednesday he would prevent Harvard from having international students entering the country, an aggressive move the school called illegal. And they, by the way, updated their lawsuit to include this in the same proclamation. Trump also urged Marco Rubio to consider revoking current visas for Harvard students. The extraordinary action marks the first time Mr. Trump has tried to directly use the power of the presidency against Harvard, an indication of how personal the effort to inflict distress on the Ivy League university has become for him. And I don't know that this is the first time. I mean, he canceled all their grants anyway. He said he was looking into this and now he's done it. The school, which is all but certain to challenge the legality of Mr. Trump's action, and they have, has become a focal point of Trump's effort to align higher education with his political agenda. That effort began as one focused on addressing allegations of anti Semitism on college campuses. But that was a front and we all know it. And it has moved beyond that issue now to include targeting universities over diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and support of transgender athletes. So we'll keep an eye on this Harvard lawsuit for you. This is from Steve Vladik at 1. First, something happened yesterday afternoon that I couldn't believe, and that sets a new low standard for the shameless hypocrisy on the part of of both the U.S. department of justice and the Texas Attorney General's office. Within a span of just over six hours, one, the federal government sued Texas challenging a state law under which undocumented immigrants who reside in Texas are eligible for in state tuition at Texas's colleges and universities. And two, Texas agreed to settle the lawsuit by consenting to a judgment under which the state would be permanently enjoined from enforcing the law because it violates the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, ostensibly because it is preempted by federal law. And three, the consent judgment was approved by the district judge, Judge Reed O' Connor, who had a 100% chance of having this case assigned to him since it was filed by the federal government in the Wichita Falls Division of the Northern District of Texas. There are at least three problems with what happened here, says Professor Vladek. First, the Supreme Court has long made clear that Article 3 courts lack the power to adjudicate such transparently collusive lawsuits because there is no true case or controversy when both litigants desire precisely the same result. Indeed, district courts are supposed to have an obligation in such circumstances to protect the jurisdiction of the federal courts, but not so much here. Second, even if there's some way to satisfy Article 3 in this context, it's Republicans who have spent much of the past decade railing against what they've described as sue and settle, where a federal agency defendant agrees to settle a lawsuit with a plaintiff on the alleged ground that the agency agrees with the plaintiff's regulatory goals. Those cases usually take longer than six hours, tend to involve contexts in which the agency has had a good faith argument that it's going to lose the lawsuit if it doesn't settle, and three are typically brought by directly affected interest groups. In all three respects, this seems worse. Indeed, part of what appears to have prompted yesterday's activity was the fact that two bills intended to repeal the 2001 state law failed this week in the Texas legislature. A collusive lawsuit by the United States against a state shouldn't be a backdoor when the democratic process has already declined to intervene. And third, of all the courthouses in which the United States and Texas could have played this game, they singled out Wichita Falls, one of the handful of single judge divisions remaining in any federal district court in the country after The Judicial Conference's March 2024 policy statement, strongly discouraging the practice. Not only does that suggest a lack of confidence on the party's part that a randomly assigned judge would have endorsed the shenanigans, but it also drives home that for all the complaining by the current administration and its supporters about judge shopping by litigants challenging Trump policies, the only real judge shopping that's currently going on is by the federal government. He concludes by saying it's all a stain on the federal courts, one that in this case comes at the literal expense of as many as 20,000 Texans who have been living in the United States since they were children, everyone involved in this sham proceeding ought to be ashamed of themselves. And if given the chance, the 5th Circuit shouldn't let it stand. But I'm not holding my breath. You can read this whole piece. There's a lot more to it at one. First on Substack, that's Professor Vladek's very informative newsletter. Subscribe when you can. Next up from Politico, Trump administration officials delayed and redacted a government forecast because it predicts an increase in the nation's trade deficit in farm goods later this year. That's according to two people familiar the numbers run counter to Trump's messaging that his economic policies, including tariffs, will reduce US Trade imbalances. The politically inconvenient data prompted administration officials to block publication of the written analysis normally attached to the report because they disliked what it said about the deficit. The published report, released Monday but dated May 29, includes numbers that are unchanged from how they would have read in the unredacted report. That's what the people said who were granted anonymity. Policymakers, farm groups and commodities traders rely on the closely watched report, which the Agriculture Department issues quarterly for its analysis of imports and exports of major farm commodities, including cotton and livestock. The highly unusual rollout could raise questions about potential political meddling with government reports that have traditionally been trusted for decades. Quote, objectivity is really key here and the public depends on it. That's what Joe Glober said. He's a former USDA chief economist. Quote, to lose that trust would be terrible. Where the hell is Beaks? We have a fake crop report. All right, next up from the Post, the Supreme Court Thursday sided with a straight woman who claimed she faced bias in the workplace after she was passed over for positions that went to gay colleagues. The decision will make it easier for people who are white, male or not gay to prove job discrimination claims. The justices unanimously struck down a standard used in nearly half of the nation's federal circuits that required members of groups that historically have not faced discrimination to meet a higher bar to prove workplace bias than members of minority groups. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the only black woman on the high court, wrote the opinion that sided with Marlene Ames, an Ohio state government employee who argued it was unconstitutional to have different standards for different groups of people. Congress left no room for courts to impose special requirements on majority group plaintiffs alone. That's what Jackson wrote in the ruling, portions of which she read from the bench. Next up from NBC and some good news. Four states petitioned the FDA Food and Drug Administration on Thursday to lift its lingering restrictions on abortion pills. The attorneys general of California, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York argue in the petition that the FDA's current regulations make it difficult to prescribe mifepristone, one of two pills involved in a medication abortion in primary care settings, despite evidence that it's extremely safe to do so. Quote Given Mifepressone's 25 year safety record, there is simply no scientific or medical reason to subject it to such extraordinary restrictions. That is New York Attorney General Letitia James. In a statement, she went on to say, the FDA must follow the science and lift these unnecessary barriers that put patients at risk and push providers out of care. Of course, this comes on the heel of Trump's FDA idiot saying that he wants to do a review of the safety of mifepriston. So when Attorney General Letitia James says the FDA must follow the science, that's why Trump put non scientists in charge of the fda. And from the Times A federal judge Thursday temporarily blocked the Trump administration's wholesale dismantling of AmeriCorps, an independent federal agency that facilitates public community service opportunities, reversing the termination of its grants and volunteer network across 24 Democratic led states. In an opinion explaining the ruling, Judge Deborah Boardman of the Federal District Court in Maryland wrote that the various programs funded through AmeriCorps, which include public health, veteran transition services, conservation and environmental protection, and education support, have come to fill a void in government services in many parts of the country. The sudden suspension of those programs, which she emphasized was done at the behest of doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, left states marooned and struggling to provide for their residents. In limiting her order to the grants and programs supporting only the 24 states that sued, only volunteers working in those states could be restored. And this is again in anticipation of a potential Supreme Court decision that could block nationwide injunctions, which, as we know, the Trump administration has been complaining about. All right, everybody, it's time for some good trouble. What are you guys doing? Senator Rick Scott, the Voldemort of Medicare fraud felons, is accepting applications for internships. So if you have a lot of experience in Medicare fraud, you should definitely apply now. Rick Scott and his wife held stocks in firms that did business with the Maduro regime in Venezuela and a shipping firm with close ties to Russia. So if you have any of that kind of experience with the Maduro regime or Russia, you could apply too. He also recently stashed $3 million in the Caymans. So if you're really good with hiding money in tax havens, you'd be a great candidate for an internship with Rick Scott. So have fun with it. There's a link in the show notes. Next up, John Fugal saying, followed by Congresswoman Julie Johnson. Stick around. We'll be right back after these messages.