This is an adapted excerpt from the Jan. 12 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
Amid the blitz of headlines, you might not have seen the news that on Monday, a federal court blocked the Trump administration from cutting billions of dollars Congress had appropriated for clean energy in blue states.
The administration admitted that it wanted to cut funding for states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, and leave in place funding for states that voted for Donald Trump. But a federal court has now ruled that illegal.
That ruling came after another federal court on Monday stopped Trump from shutting down a big offshore wind farm in Rhode Island and Connecticut.
It’s the worst rebuke Trump has had from congressional Republicans since he’s been back in office in this disastrous year.
Just one day prior, yet another federal court blocked Trump from cutting funding to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The group criticized the flock-of-ducks-level insane quackery at Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the president responded by canceling its grant. But a judge has now ruled that was illegal retaliation, and so the funding has to be reinstated.
On Friday, a federal judge in Washington blocked Trump from cutting off federal election funds to states in retaliation for them not changing their election rules in ways that he wants. The judge said, “The Constitution assigns no authority to the president over federal election administration.”
On the same day, another federal court blocked Trump from freezing billions of dollars for child care and social services for kids — again — apparently in Democratic-run states.
He’s losing all the time and everywhere now. There may still be people who are shocked that Trump keeps breaking the law over and over and over again, blatantly and insistently. But the courts are not shocked anymore, and they just tell him “no” every single day — often multiple times a day.
It’s not just the courts. Last week, in one 48-hour stretch, we had a Senate vote for a war powers resolution to block Trump from any further military action in Venezuela, with five Republican senators siding with Democrats to pass that. It was enough to advance that resolution, and it will get another vote this week.
That came right on the heels of 17 Republicans in the House breaking ranks with Trump and siding with Democrats on the Affordable Care Act to try to at least temporarily undo the disastrous decision by Trump and Republicans in their so-called One Big Beautiful Bill to send tens of thousands of Americans’ health insurance rates through the roof.
Trump is already whining about how he might have to veto it, if and when it passes the Senate — because he definitely wants to make sure that people’s health insurance premiums double or triple in cost because of something he personally did.
It’s the worst rebuke Trump has had from congressional Republicans since he has been back in office in this disastrous year.
This didn’t get as much attention as it should have, but right on the heels of the Senate giving Trump a one-finger salute on Venezuela and the House giving him a one-finger salute on what he did to people’s health insurance, Congress also rejected his steep budget cuts to federal science programs.
Trump is trying to cut the National Science Foundation by 56%, but Congress is saying it will cut it by less than 1%. He wants to slash NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Congress wants no cuts.
Trump wants to cut basic research, which has been the lifeblood of American technological innovation since World War II; Congress instead is bumping it up more than 2%.
This is a bipartisan thing. It started in the Senate as a bipartisan agreement, and last week the House voted for it as well.
I know it’s like muscle memory to assume that: a) Congress does nothing; and b) If they defy that rule and do something, it’s always terrible, but something is changing.
Republicans in the House are now down to such a slim margin that if every Democrat is there, at the moment, Republicans can afford only one defection on any given vote.
They know they’re going to get walloped in the midterms. With moderate Democrat Mary Peltola announcing on Monday that she’s going to run against the unpopular Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, that means Democrats are getting pretty close to a shot at taking over the Senate in the midterms as well.
The American people are reacting instinctually to what Trump is doing to us, using our small-d democratic muscle memory to use our right of free speech, our right to freedom of assembly, to say no.
Also on Monday, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona brought a high-powered lawsuit against the administration and Pete Hegseth, suing to block their efforts to reduce his rank and dock his retirement pay, all for saying the true statement that service members are supposed to disobey illegal orders.
The state of Illinois, now joined by the city of Chicago, and the state of Minnesota, along with the city of Minneapolis, have also brought major lawsuits against the Trump administration to stop the attack by Trump’s federal agents against their constituents.
Now, if the administration was hoping its shambolic violence would discourage Americans from standing up to them, they do not understand Americans.
There were huge protests last weekend against the Trump administration in Minneapolis, where Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer last week. There were also protests in downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado, where Good is from originally.
People took to the streets in places all across the country, not just in major cities such as New York City or Boston, but in places including Clayton, Missouri; Carson City, Nevada; Huntington Beach, California; San Antonio; and even in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the temperature was minus 25 degrees.
Usually, when we have this many protests to cover all across the country, it’s because there’s been some long-planned thing, where people had weeks of notice. That was true with the first No Kings Day or the second.
What happened these past few days was not that; it was essentially spontaneous, everywhere. There were well over a thousand protests taking place in every state in the country.
The American people are reacting instinctually to what Trump is doing to us, using our small-d democratic muscle memory to use our right of free speech, our right to freedom of assembly, to say no.
They said it couldn’t be done. But Congress is waking up, the courts are waking up — and the people are absolutely fully awake.
Allison Detzel contributed.
