May 22, 2025

Welcome to The Opposition, a weekly premium newsletter focused on the legal battles holding the Trump administration accountable for its anti-democratic executive actions. Upgrade to premium today for $120/year and always receive this newsletter in your inbox.

This week, we take a look at two subtle Trump-backed policy changes that could upset the justice and judicial systems.

The first is a proposal within the Department of Justice that would give political appointees unreviewable power to charge sitting lawmakers and candidates for office with crimes. The second is a provision in the House GOP’s budget bill that attempts to render federal courts powerless when parties defy their orders.

As always, thank you so much for reading.

– Jacob Knutson, reporter

Catch up quickly 

• A federal judge declared the aggressive takeover by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) of the U.S. Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit, “null and void” after finding DOGE’s actions illegal.
  
  
• The Trump administration “unquestionably” violated a court order against deporting migrants to countries other than their own, a federal judge determined. The judge did not decide if the government’s actions were criminally contemptuous, saying he would leave that determination for another day.
  
  
• A federal judge dismissed trespassing charges against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was arrested by federal agents outside of an ICE facility earlier this month. During the dismissal hearing, the judge reprimanded federal prosecutors for more than five minutes over Baraka’s arrest.

The DOJ is gearing up to prosecute Trump’s political opponents

This week, Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) became the first sitting member of Congress to be criminally prosecuted by the Trump administration. But she may be the first of many.

Under a new Department of Justice (DOJ) proposal, Attorney General Pam Bondi could gain unreviewable power to charge members of, and candidates for, Congress with crimes, the Washington Post reports.

Under current DOJ policy, before taking investigative steps or bringing charges in criminal cases against public officials and political candidates, prosecutors must first consult and get approval from the Public Integrity Section (PIN). 

Created after the Watergate scandal, PIN is made up of career lawyers that specialize in high-profile public corruption crimes. One of the section’s core duties is ensuring that criminal investigations and charges against elected and appointed officials are by the book and not motivated by politics.

If implemented, the new proposal would cut PIN out of public corruption cases. 

What cases should be opened, and how those cases take shape, would instead be solely up to politically appointed attorneys and Bondi, making it even easier for the DOJ to…

The GOP’s chaotic bid to defang the courts

Republicans are considering a new judicial requirement that would let Trump skirt court orders for a short time — for the small price of nationwide legal pandemonium. In their multitrillion-dollar budget proposal, the House GOP included a provision that would, if it becomes law, curtail when courts can force parties to comply with their orders.

The measure would require that judges collect a bond from all parties seeking a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction, otherwise the resulting orders will be unenforceable.

Currently, judges have the ability to issue injunctive bonds to protect the target of a court order from potential harm if the order is later found to have been wrongfully issued. But they often don’t require such bonds in lawsuits against the government, as plaintiffs may have limited resources and the government likely won’t be substantially injured by orders.

On its face, the change appears quite small. But as Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, recently noted, the provision would render hundreds and hundreds of other court orders in cases unrelated to Trump unenforceable. 

These would include orders in cases dealing with extremely sensitive issues like…

To do list

• For those in the Washington metropolitan area, Public Citizen has organized a protest tonight outside Trump’s National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia, where he’ll be dining with the top buyers of his “$TRUMP” meme coin…