Weiser, fellow Democratic AGs warn U.S. is on ‘precipice' of constitutional crisis
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser told a crowd gathered in a Denver high school auditorium Wednesday night that opponents of President Donald Trump's administration are fighting 'to keep America, America.'
Weiser welcomed three of his counterparts from other states — Attorneys General Nick Brown of Washington, Anne Lopez of Hawaii and Aaron Ford of Nevada — for the latest in a series of 'community impact hearings' on Trump's agenda at George Washington High School.
The four are among the 23 elected Democratic attorneys general nationwide who have led the fight against the second Trump administration's agenda in the courts. Weiser has sued Trump at least a dozen times so far, including challenges to the administration's attempt to end the 14th Amendment's protections for birthright citizenship; its sweeping freeze of many federal grant and aid programs; its mass layoffs of federal employees; and its defunding of medical research through the National Institutes of Health.
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Weiser said the legal challenges have borne some fruit in the form of preliminary injunctions and other procedural victories, but acknowledged growing alarm over whether 'this democratic republic (will) hold.'
'These court victories are important, but more important is everyone's voice,' Weiser said, encouraging the crowd to join protests like the one that drew 8,000 people to the Colorado Capitol on April 5. 'We need to use our voice.'
Here are the legal actions Colorado has taken against Trump administration
Wednesday's event came amid an outcry this week over the fates of more than 200 immigrants deported by the Trump administration to a brutal maximum-security prison in El Salvador, and promises by Trump to send American citizens there next. At least one of the deportees, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was removed as a result of an 'administrative error,' while advocates, attorneys and family members of many others say that they were falsely identified as members of a transnational gang because of tattoos honoring family members or their favorite soccer team.
The administration has also moved to target hundreds of lawful permanent residents and student visa holders for deportation, including Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student who led pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations at Columbia University, and Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University doctoral student who was detained after writing an op-ed in her student newspaper. Lawyers for Jeanette Vizguerra, a Colorado woman without legal status who was detained by federal authorities last month, have also alleged in court that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement retaliated against Vizguerra for her immigration advocacy work.
'We won't tolerate people being picked up without any process and shipped to some other country with no recourse,' Weiser told the crowd to applause. 'The First Amendment matters, because when you speak, and you speak your truth, you cannot be — in this country — retaliated against for speaking your truth.'
Weiser, serving his second term as attorney general after winning reelection in 2022, is running for Colorado governor in 2026. He faces a tough primary contest against U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, who entered the race last week.
Weiser and his fellow attorneys general heard stories from Coloradans personally impacted by the Trump administration's actions, including federal workers, homelessness service providers and refugee support organizations.
Marya Washburn, a U.S. Forest Service employee, was part of a firefighting team that responded to the Alexander Mountain Fire in Colorado last summer. In February, she was among the 3,400 probationary employees at the agency to receive termination notices from the Trump administration, and although she was reinstated thanks to a court order, that order is set to end on Saturday.
'I'm shaking,' Washburn said as she read from her notes, citing concerns about cuts to firefighting personnel ahead of the 2025 fire season. 'I'm angry.'
Trump's mass layoffs, funding freezes and attempted shutdowns of congressionally-established agencies amount to an unprecedented expansion of executive power that runs contrary to longstanding separation-of-powers principles in the U.S. Constitution. Fears that his administration will defy adverse court rulings have also reached new heights in recent days, especially following its apparent inaction in the face of a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling last week stating the administration must 'facilitate' the return of Abrego Garcia from El Salvador.
Brown, elected as Washington attorney general last year, said that the outcomes of some legal challenges to the administration — like the restoration of grant funding that Trump had attempted to freeze — had 'for the most part' given him 'confidence in our system.' But that confidence is now being tested.
'This is the first time — this week, in the days past — where I think we're really getting to the precipice of a constitutional crisis,' he said. 'And I don't say that lightly.'
'I don't have all the answers. I do not know what it means for a president to blatantly disregard what a court says. I don't think we're quite there yet,' Brown continued. 'But we might be there tomorrow, or next week.'
SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
42 minutes ago
- New York Post
McCloskeys win back AR-15 rifle 5 years after Black Lives Matter protest confrontation
The St. Louis couple who went viral in 2020 for wielding guns as Black Lives Matter protesters marched outside their property have regained possession of their semiautomatic rifle. After a years long and complex legal struggle to reclaim their weapons after they were seized by authorities more than five years ago, police have returned the AR-15 to St. Louis lawyers Mark and Patricia McCloskey. Advertisement 'It only took 3 lawsuits, 2 trips to the Court of Appeals and 1,847 days, but I got my AR15 back!' Mark McCloskey posted to his X account on Friday, along with several photos of him carrying the gun. 'We defended our home, were persecuted by the left, smeared by the press, and threatened with death, but we never backed down.' In a separate X post, Mark McCloskey also shared a video of himself retrieving the rifle from a police station. 'That gun may have only been worth $1,500 or something, and it cost me a lot of time and a lot of effort to get it back, but you have to do that,' Mark McCloskey told Fox News Digital, adding he owns other weapons. 'You have to let them know that you will never back down, you'll never give up.' Advertisement 3 Mark McCloskey was given his AR-15 back FOX News He said he expects their pistol, wielded by Patricia McCloskey during the confrontation, to be returned by next week. The AR-15 ended up in the possession of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, while the pistol wound up in the possession of the St. Louis Sheriff's Department, he added. 'Each and every one of us owns a personal responsibility for our freedom and our democratic republic,' Mark McCloskey said. Advertisement In June 2020, a video of the gun-toting McCloskeys took the internet by storm after a swarm of Black Lives Matter protesters broke down an iron gate and ignored a 'No Trespassing' sign on their private street. 3 The couple went viral in 2020 for wielding guns as Black Lives Matter protesters marched outside their property. UPI 3 Their weapons were seized by authorities five years ago. UPI The couple, who said they felt threatened, armed themselves before heading outside to ward off the crowd, which was on its way to the former mayor's home. No one was hurt. Advertisement After the incident, the McCloskeys's were were seized by law enforcement, and they were charged with unlawful use of a weapon by St. Louis' former Democratic prosecutor, Kim Gardner. Shortly after that, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt moved to dismiss charges brought by Gardner. In 2021, the McCloskeys pleaded guilty to misdemeanor fourth-degree assault and second-degree harassment but later were granted a pardon by former Missouri Gov. Mike Parson. Last month, a Missouri appeals court confirmed the expungement of the McCloskeys' misdemeanor convictions, which, under state law, means it is as though the incident never happened, Mark McCloskey said. 'If you've been wronged, if you've been overreached by the leftist government — you can't give up,' Mark McCloskey told Fox News Digital. 'You can't let them get an inch.' The St. Louis Sheriff's Office and the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
New York Times
42 minutes ago
- New York Times
Quote of the Day: Texas Pushes Redistricting Into an Era of ‘Maximum Warfare'
'Redistricting is going from like a decennial bare-knuckle rugby match to an every-other-year Hunger Games.' JAMIE RASKIN, Democratic representative from Maryland, on efforts to regularly rezone districts for political gain outside of the traditional post-census period.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Not just Big Bird: What to know about the Center for Public Broadcasting and its funding cuts
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has helped pay for PBS, NPR, 1,500 local radio and television stations, and programs such as Sesame Street and Finding Your Roots, announced Friday it would shut down after the U.S. government removed its funding. The organization told staff most positions will end with the fiscal year on September 30. A small transition team will remain until January. The private nonprofit corporation was founded in 1968 after Congress authorized its formation. It now comes to an end after almost six decades of fueling the production of celebrated educational programming, cultural content, and emergency alerts about natural disasters. Trump cancels funding President Donald Trump signed a bill on July 24, canceling about $1.1 billion that had been approved for public broadcasting. The White House claims the public media system is politically biased, and an unnecessary expense, and conservatives have particularly directed their anger at NPR and PBS. Lawmakers with large rural constituencies voiced concern about what the cuts could mean for some local public stations in their state. They warned that some stations will have to close. The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday reinforced the policy change by excluding funding for the corporation for the first time in more than 50 years as part of a broader spending bill. How it started Congress passed legislation creating the body in 1967. This came several years after Newton Minow, the then-Federal Communications Commission chair, described commercial television as a 'vast wasteland' and called for programming in the public interest. The corporation doesn't produce programming, and it doesn't own, operate, or control any public broadcasting stations. The corporation, PBS, and NPR are independent of each other, as are local public television and radio stations. Rural stations hit hard Roughly 70 percent of the corporation's money went directly to 330 PBS and 246 NPR stations across the country. The cuts are expected to weigh most heavily on smaller public media outlets away from big cities, and it's likely some won't survive. NPR's president estimated that as many as 80 NPR stations may close in the following year. Mississippi Public Broadcasting has already decided to eliminate a streaming channel that airs children's programming such as 'Caillou' and 'Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood' 24 hours a day. Maine's public media system is looking at a hit of $2.5 million, or about 12 percent of its budget, for the next fiscal year. The state's rural residents rely heavily on public media for weather updates and disaster alerts. In Kodiak, Alaska, KMXT estimated the cuts would slice 22 percent from its budget. Public radio stations in the sprawling, heavily rural state often provide not just news but alerts about natural disasters like tsunamis, landslides, and volcanic eruptions. From Big Bird to war documentaries 'Sesame Street' initially aired in 1969. Child viewers, adults, and guest stars alike were instantly hooked. Over the decades, characters from Big Bird to Cookie Monster and Elmo have become household favorites. Entertainer Carol Burnett appeared on that inaugural episode. "I would have done anything they wanted me to do,' she said. 'I loved being exposed to all that goodness and humor.' The New York Times reports 'Sesame Street' will survive without the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NPR and PBS get a relatively small portion of their annual budget from the corporation, and children's TV programs are produced independently of those organizations. Still, the NYT reports the cutbacks could affect the availability of those shows, particularly in pockets of the country without widespread access to broadband internet and mobile data. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. started the program 'Finding Your Roots' in 2006 under the title 'African American Lives'. He invited prominent Black celebrities and traced their family trees back to slavery. When the paper trail ran out, they would use DNA to see which ethnic group they were from in Africa. Challenged by a viewer to open the show to non-Black celebrities, Gates agreed, and the series was renamed 'Faces of America', which had to be changed again after the name was taken. The show is PBS's most-watched program on linear TV and the most-streamed non-drama program. Season 10 reached nearly 18 million people across linear and digital platforms and also received its first Emmy nomination. Grant money from the nonprofit has also funded lesser-known food, history, music, and other shows created by stations across the country. Documentarian Ken Burns, celebrated for creating the documentaries 'The Civil War', 'Baseball', and 'The Vietnam War', told PBS NewsHour that the corporation accounted for about 20 percent of his films' budgets. He said he would make it up, but projects receiving 50 percent to 75 percent of their funding from the organization won't. The influence of shows Children's programming in the 1960s was made up of shows including 'Captain Kangaroo', 'Romper Room', and the violent skirmishes between 'Tom & Jerry'. 'Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood' mostly taught social skills. PBS also aired programs by 'Monty Python' and broadcast shows such as 'Downton Abbey' and 'The French Chef' with Julia Child. Education professionals and child psychologists designed 'Sesame Street' to help low-income and minority students aged between two and five overcome some of the deficiencies they had when entering school. Social scientists had long noted that white and higher-income kids were often better prepared. One of the most widely cited studies about the impact of 'Sesame Street' compared households that got access to the show with those who didn't. It found that the children exposed to 'Sesame Street' were 14 percent more likely to be enrolled in the correct grade level for their age at middle and high school. Over the years, 'Finding Your Roots' showed Natalie Morales discovering she's related to one of the legendary pirates of the Caribbean, and former 'Saturday Night Live' star Andy Samberg finding his biological grandmother and grandfather. It revealed that drag queen RuPaul and Senator Cory Booker are cousins, as are actors Meryl Streep and Eva Longoria. 'The two subliminal messages of 'Finding Your Roots', which are needed more urgently today than ever, is that what has made America great is that we're a nation of immigrants,' said Gates. 'And secondly, at the level of the genome, despite our apparent physical differences, we're 99.99 percent the same.' Solve the daily Crossword
