Today’s edition of quick hits.
* This was quite a hearing: “President Donald Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Casey Means, on Wednesday would not commit to encourage parents to vaccinate their children, while also fending off questions before Congress about her business interests and stated past use of psychedelics.”
* A big story out of LA: “The FBI served search warrants Wednesday at the Los Angeles Unified School District’s headquarters and the home of its superintendent, a nationally recognized school administrator. The nature of the federal investigation involving the nation’s second-largest school district and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho’s home was not immediately clear.”
* The administration’s immigration enforcement tactics continue to struggle in the courts: “The Trump administration’s latest policy of deporting immigrants to ‘third countries’ to which they have no ties is unlawful and must be set aside, a federal judge ruled Wednesday in a case that already reached the nation’s highest court.”
* The end of the road for Summers: “Fallout from the Epstein files across elite circles of academia deepened Wednesday when Larry Summers, a former treasury secretary and the ex-president of Harvard University, said he will resign from his teaching appointments at the end of the academic year.”
* The DOJ’s lack of credibility continues to carry consequences: “A federal magistrate judge ruled on Tuesday that the court, and not the Justice Department, would search devices that the government seized from a Washington Post reporter’s home last month, resolving an impasse over how to handle the materials. The judge, William B. Porter of the Eastern District of Virginia, came down against an ‘unsupervised, wholesale’ search expedition conducted by the government.” * Keep an eye on this one: “The Trump administration is weighing a possible executive order or other action that would require banks to collect citizenship information from customers, a new front in the administration’s crackdown on immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, according to people familiar with the matter.” * Back to the drawing board for the ROTOR Act: “The House of Representatives narrowly rejected an aviation safety bill that was spurred by the deadly midair collision near Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, one day after the Pentagon abruptly withdrew its support for the bipartisan bill.” A scheduling note: I’ll be away from my desk for a couple of days, but I’ll be back to the usual schedule on Monday. See you then.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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