Good morning. It is September 8th. It is a bright, pleasant morning in New York City on the way into a run of decent weather, by the forecast, and this is your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Police opened fire on protesters in Nepal after young people took to the streets in response to the government shutting down multiple social media platforms. Reuters reporting from Kathmandu writes, “Unrest killed at least 19 people in Nepal on Monday, authorities said, as police in the capital fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters trying to storm parliament in anger at a social media shutdown and corruption.” It doesn't sound like “unrest” did the killing per se. It sounds more like the cops did. “Some of the mainly youth protesters,” Reuters continues, “forced their way into the parliament complex in Kathmandu by breaking through a barricade, a local official said, setting fire to an ambulance and hurling objects at lines of riot police guarding the legislature. ‘The police have been firing indiscriminately,’ one protester told the ANI news agency.” The story says “the protesters carried flags and placards with slogans such as ‘shut down corruption and not social media’ ‘unban social media and youth against corruption’ as they marched through Kathmandu.” 

Two Palestinian gunmen reportedly killed at least six people before being shot themselves while attacking people at a bus stop in an Israeli settlement outside Jerusalem. New York Times reports that “Hamas said the shooting was a ‘heroic and unique operation and a natural response to what it described as Israel's ongoing aggression against our Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem.’ The Palestinian Authority,” the Times writes, 
denounced all forms of violence and terrorism, regardless of their source. Israeli military has begun to move against multiple West Bank villages that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the attackers came from.” 

On the front of this morning's print, New York Times, the lead news spot is a two-column wide NEWS ANALYSIS piece. “As Congress Lies Down, Trump Walks All Over It / He Seizes Power on Spending, Oversight and National Security While Republicans Shrug.” It's a solid, accurate headline. On a synthesis of recent news, the Times writes, “The Pentagon barred the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee from making an oversight visit to a military spy agency. Armed forces off the coast of Venezuela began a military campaign against alleged members of a drug cartel without any authorization from Congress and without notifying key members. The White House informed Congress it planned to use a rare maneuver to skirt a vote and cancel nearly $5 billion in foreign aid funding that lawmakers had already approved, the latest escalation of its campaign to undercut the legislative branch's spending powers. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, ousted the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just a month after senators had confirmed her. He also put forward changes that would effectively restrict access to COVID-19 vaccines after pledging to senators during his own confirmation hearings that he would not make it more difficult.” 

The story continues, “the Trump administration continues to erode the power of Congress, trampling on its constitutional prerogatives in ways large and small. Through it all, Republicans in charge have mostly shrugged, and in some cases outright applauded, as their powers, once jealously guarded, diminish in ways that will be difficult to reverse.” Aptly, the first two live quotes in the piece, objecting to the president usurping congressional power, both come from Democrats.

After the jump, the story says that “the Republican response has amounted to mild protests. When Senator John Thune of South Dakota,” the Times writes, “the majority leader, expressed unhappiness after the spate of agency firings, he cited procedural objections. ‘We confirm these people, we go through a lot of work to get them confirmed, and they're in office a month?’ he asked. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the number two Republican and an orthopedic surgeon, raised eyebrows when he told Mr. Kennedy at last week's hearing that he had grown deeply concerned about his handling of vaccines after reminding the secretary that he had promised to uphold the highest standards for vaccines during his confirmation hearings.” Did someone say deeply concerned? Nobody does deeply concerned like Maine's Senator Susan Collins, who shows up in the piece saying that President Trump's plan to simply refuse to spend appropriated money is a clear violation of the law, but not holding any hearings about it as the chair of the Appropriations Committee and focusing her efforts instead, the Times writes, “on working with top Senate Democrats to add new safeguards to next year's spending bills that would ensure the Trump administration allocates federal dollars as lawmakers intend.” Because the solution to the president breaking the law is to propose a new law. 

On the left side of the top of the page, the headline is, “ICE Raid Sends Mixed Message To South Korea / U.S. Seeks Investment but Arrests Workers.” The ICE raid on the battery plant in the Hyundai factory complex in Georgia didn't really send a mixed message. It sent a very clear message that just happened to contradict other messages that the administration claims to be promoting. So the story notes that in July, the Trump administration extracted a pledge of $350 billion in investment in the U.S. in the course of Trump's tariff shakedown. But because the Trump administration runs on fantasies and gestures, it's rebuffing imperial integration, even as it insists on imperial tribute. The Times writes, “Building that much in America all at once requires many thousands of construction workers. Factory construction has boomed in the United States in recent years as a result of laws subsidizing semiconductor and clean energy equipment manufacturing, mostly in Republican districts in the industrial Midwest and Southeast. Data centers to feed artificial intelligence models have kept many contractors occupied as well. But amid that demand for workers, the Trump administration essentially cut off the flow of immigrants who had been arriving at the southern border. In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security has begun increasing worksite enforcement operations, which are seen as a more efficient way to get undocumented immigrants to leave the country in large numbers.”

The story does note that “in Georgia, local politicians and labor organizers have raised concerns about the possibility that undocumented people were being hired to work at the site, where construction began in 2023 and whether labor conditions met legal standards. Three workers have died at the complex over the past three years.” Notably, however, their response to this was not arrayed by OSHA. 

The rest of the top of the front page is taken up by a picture of someone tending to a young tree, with the caption headline, “Planting 15 million trees in India to fight deforestation and extreme heat in Vijayapura, a major government project distributed and sustained millions of saplings over the past decade, turning the once arid region green.” It's a promising sounding story about hope for our depleted planet. But when you follow the captions referral to page six, you find there's not really a story at all. But another one of those addled attempts to put a multimedia online showpiece into print, among the scattered text blocks that used to be modules in a scroll. There's one in which a water resources manager says that in 2016 the tree cover in Vijayapura was only 0.17%. Nowhere in the rest of the scattered text or in the online version does this news article-like object tell the reader what the percentage of forest cover is today. 

Below the fold, there's a story “Trump’s Name Is on Projects He Opposed.” In Southern Connecticut, the Times writes, “federal government is replacing 118-year-old bridge along America's busiest rail corridor. The $1.3 billion project was largely funded by the 2021 infrastructure law that was championed by then-President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and strenuously opposed by Donald J. Trump. These days, however, motorists cruising by the construction site might be forgiven for thinking that a certain famous New York developer was responsible for it all. ‘President Donald J. Trump,’ a sign by the road declares, ‘rebuilding America's infrastructure.’ In recent months,” the story continues, “a number of similar signs have popped up in front of major infrastructure projects financed by the bipartisan 2021 legislation, a $1.2 trillion package that Mr. Trump, who left office in January of that year, had passionately railed against. He called the bill ‘a loser for the USA’ and warned that Republican lawmakers who signed on could be thrown out of office by angry primary voters ‘Patriots will never forget he wrote.’” Yes. Well, or they will remember things the way they're told to remember them.

Next to that, illustrated by a postage-stamp of a picture, showing protesters holding up a pink postage stamp of a banner, depicting the stylized figure of someone about to hurl a submarine sandwich, the headline is, “The New Front of Resistance, Grand Juries.” 

“In the three weeks since President Trump flooded the streets of Washington with hundreds of troops and federal agents,” the Times writes,”there have been only a few scattered protests and scarcely a word from Congress, which has quietly gone along with the deployment.” Actually, the AP reports there were thousands of people out in the streets of Washington, D.C. on Saturday, precisely to protest Trump's incursion on the city, but the online version of this story went up on Saturday, And what are going to do? Get someone to revise it before you print it in Monday's paper? Anyway. “But,” the story continues, “one show of resistance has come from an extraordinary source, federal grand jurors. In what could be read as a citizen's revolt, ordinary people serving on grand juries have repeatedly refused in recent days to indict their fellow residents who became entangled in either the president's immigration crackdown or his more recent show of force. It has happened in at least seven cases, including three times for the same defendant.” Sure, this could be read as resistance or a citizen's revolt, but as the story goes on to note, it seems to be less about the grand jurors drawing a line than it is about Donald Trump's prosecutors refusing to recognize the existing lines. “Because of the deployment,” the Times writes, “a flurry of defendants have been charged with federal felonies in cases that would typically have been handled at the local court level if they were brought at all.” If grand jurors don't think that throwing a sandwich at a cop's body armor is felony assault, or that mentally ill or intellectually disabled people are committing a felony threat against the president when they spout off against him, they may just be drawing logical conclusions about the facts and the evidence. “These grand jury refusals to indict,” the Times' writes, “while remarkable on their own, point to a broader breakdown in the bonds of trust that judges have traditionally afforded to government lawyers when they show up in court. The erosion of this trust, known in legal parlance as the presumption of regularity, has been widespread in the many civil cases challenging Mr. Trump's political agenda, where judges have repeatedly accused Justice Department lawyers of misleading them or violating their orders.” Most of the legal system, it turns out, still wants to see something resembling the rule of law. 

But not, in breaking news, in the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice John Roberts this morning, in one of those unavoidable cascades of negation that follow from the Trump administration's efforts to rewrite the law, issued an order blocking a lower court's order that had reinstated a member of the Federal Trade Commission after Donald Trump attempted to fire her, attaching no legal explanation to what was presented as an administrative stay, even though the firing that Roberts now permitted to go through, directly violates the 80 year old unanimous precedent of Humphrey's executor versus the United States, in which the court specifically ruled that the president did not have the power to fire a member of the FTC. The current Supreme Court is almost certainly preparing to overturn that precedent when it gets the chance through litigation, but that's rather different from the chief justice preemptively liberating Donald Trump from what was unquestionably the existing law. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going. You really do, with your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. So do send those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.