This is the Feb. 11, 2026, edition of “The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe” newsletter.Subscribe here to get it delivered straight to your inbox every Monday through Friday.
A few developments last night suggest that James Madison’s checks and balances still have a fighting chance of carrying America through the serious constitutional strains of the Trump era.
No need to break out the Champagne just yet, but consider this:
The House of Representatives voted down a resolution backed by Donald Trump that would have stopped Congress from challenging the president’s tariffs. Expect a number of challenges to hit the House floor in the coming weeks.
A grand jury did what grand juries rarely do: Refused to indict defendants on charges brought by the U.S. government. In this case, the administration had sought indictments against six U.S. senators for exercising their First Amendment rights. Expect that decision to generate further blowback.
And Republican governors told the president to go pound sand because he tried to exclude Democratic governors from a White House meeting.
It would have been hard to imagine this kind of pushback against the president six months ago.
But with Trump’s poll numbers at historic lows and his behavior only becoming more toxic, politicians are beginning to exercise a few of the checks and balances on the White House that we rarely saw during the president’s first year in office.
“We cannot allow one divisive action to achieve its goal of dividing us.”
— Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, criticizing the White House for excluding Democrats from a traditionally bipartisan meeting with the president
TRUMP AND LUTNICK BACK IN THE EPSTEIN FILES
President Donald Trump’s name has surfaced again in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
A newly examined FBI document recounts a memory from former Palm Beach, Florida, Police Chief Michael Reiter.
“Thank goodness you’re stopping him,” Reiter recalled Trump saying of his department’s investigation into Epstein. “Everyone has known he’s been doing this.”
Reiter said Trump called longtime Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell “evil” and claimed he once encountered Epstein around teenagers — then “got the hell out of there.” Although his name was redacted, Reiter later confirmed the account and said the call occurred in 2006.
Trump has repeatedly said in recent years that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s sex crimes.
Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has faced renewed scrutiny over his own past contacts with Epstein. After saying he cut ties with Epstein around 2005, he later acknowledged meeting with him years afterward – including a 2012 lunch on Epstein’s island alongside his family.
Neither Lutnick nor Trump has been accused of Epstein-related crimes.
FAA CLOSES, OPENS TEXAS SKIES
The Federal Aviation Administration this morning abruptly grounded all flights into and out of El Paso International Airport for 10 days, citing unspecified security concerns. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy later said the closure was prompted by Mexican cartel drones in the airspace.
Hours later, the order was lifted.
The embarrassing snafu was apparently the result of miscommunications between the FAA and the Department of Defense.
Officer Quimby was seen at the airport, telling worried travelers, “Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.”
A CONVERSATION WITH SEN. CHRIS MURPHY
The detention of young children has become a central flashpoint in the immigration debate. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut recently traveled to Texas to seek access to Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities and meet with families caught in the system.
He joined “Morning Joe” to discuss what he saw on the ground — and the funding fight now unfolding in Congress.
MB: Senator, let’s start in Minneapolis. After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, has there been any movement toward state investigations or accountability?
CM: There is no state investigation happening because they [federal officials] decided two minutes after Alex Pretti was murdered that those officers were not going to be held accountable. These abuses will continue because the officers know that even if they commit a deadly mistake, no one is going to hold them accountable.
MB: And the enforcement operations themselves — have those practices changed since Tom Homan, the administration’s border czar, promised to clean up the mess?
CM: Nothing has changed. There are still [thousands of] ICE officers in Minneapolis. ICE is still removing young children from their homes all throughout this country.
Yesterday morning, ICE officers were patrolling bus stops in Minneapolis, hunting children, getting ready to send more kids to detention centers in Texas.
MB: You flew this week to South Texas to look into ICE detention facilities. What did you find?
CM: There are hundreds upon hundreds of kids whose lives are fundamentally changed because they are being thrown into horrific detention centers by this administration.
WG: Senator, you’ve pointed to facilities holding very young children. What are those places actually like?
CM: The detention center that Liam Ramos was in, Dilley, is called the “baby jail.” It holds hundreds of very young children — toddlers, kids under 5 — often for extended periods of time. These kids are being terrorized and traumatized on purpose.
WG: Were you able to get inside to see these facilities for yourself?
CM: I gave them a day and a half notice, plenty of time, and they refused to open the facility. They are hiding something from all of us — not just leaders in the Senate, but taxpayers as well.
KK: You also met with families who had been detained. What stayed with you?
CM: I sat with the kids for an hour. They were alive on the outside. They were dead on the inside. These kids just stared straight ahead.
MB: Senator, you sit on the appropriations committee, which decides how much money DHS and ICE receive. What can Congress do right now?
CM: We have a constitutional obligation to only fund an administration that is acting lawfully. And so we cannot — we should not — fund the Department of Homeland Security if it is committing these crimes.
Congress is not powerless — we have the authority to deny this department funding if they are going to continue to abuse and terrorize our kids.
ON THIS DATE
Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned leader of the movement to end South African apartheid, was released on this day in 1990 after 27 years behind bars.
Mandela spent much of his sentence at the notorious Robben Island prison. Confined to a small cell without a bed or plumbing, he was forced to do hard labor and permitted to meet with a visitor only once a year for 30 minutes.
Yet he remained unbroken and unbowed.
Even from prison, he became the central symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle, as mounting internal resistance and international pressure pushed the South African government toward negotiations that would ultimately dismantle the regime.
EXTRA HOT TEA: BETTOR THAN THE REST
What are the odds?
A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that amateur bettors and gamblers participating in prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are at least as good on average as economic experts and Wall Street Ph.D.s at predicting economic indicators.
“The nice thing about prediction markets is that you have to put your money where your mouth is,” Theis Jensen, a Yale University professor who worked on the study, told The New York Times. “And so that highly incentivizes you to state your true beliefs.”
The same study found that prediction market participants are at least as good as trained forecasters at predicting inflation statistics and even better at predicting interest rate moves from the Federal Reserve.
The study comes as more and more young Americans — at least a third — believe that prediction markets will become an important part of culture. The numbers are adding up: On any day, the Times reports, there is more than $60 million at stake on political and economic questions.
ONE MORE SHOT
A street scene from New York City’s Lower East Side this morning, captured by The Tea’s intrepid photographer, Mika.
💝 LOVE IS IN THE AIR 💝
With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, the “Morning Joe” family wants to know: What’s the secret to a loving, lasting relationship? Tell us yours here!
CATCH UP ON MORNING JOE
Former Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., is co-host of MS NOW's "Morning Joe" alongside Mika Brzezinski — a show that Time magazine calls "revolutionary." In addition to his career in television, Joe is a two-time New York Times best-selling author. His most recent book is "The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics — and Can Again."