Sam Feldman

Minneapolis Council committee delays liquor licenses for 2 hotels over hosting federal agents The City Council will hold a public hearing on the liquor licenses for the Canopy by Hilton in the Mill District and Depot Renaissance Hotel.

A Minneapolis City Council committee delayed action Tuesday on renewing liquor licenses for two Minneapolis hotels that have housed federal immigration officers.

These demands and losses are presumably concentrated in places where the Trump administration has focused its malevolence—which are also the places it most needs lawyers to carry out its agenda. They can try to hire new, more ideologically aligned lawyers, but they won't know what they're doing.

The federal government has a large workforce of lawyers who sought out their jobs for some combination of prestige, stability, and desire for public service. The demands of the Trump administration have caused many to leave, and the remainder are starting to break down.

Attorney's fees is an arcane & boring-sounding area of law that matters a lot because it provides public funding that makes legal representation possible even for poor people. In several circuits, people thrown in immigration detention may be able to get freed through lawyers even if they can't pay.

Currently, congestion pricing and bus fares raise roughly comparable amounts of money. If we need a billion dollars a year for transit improvements, why would we choose to get that from retaining bus fares, rather than raising the congestion fee?

As a federal district, DC can't even set its own tax policy without Congress trying to interfere. No one in Congress can justify why they should have this power, and none of them ever try to. And yet there are members of the Senate Dem caucus (Mark Kelly, Angus King) who don't support DC statehood.

I think this is the key to the periodic debate about whether buying food from restaurants is cheaper than making food at home. Home cooking for one person is historically unusual and can be inefficient and expensive.

At this point I think Texas is looking about as likely as Alaska (both toss-ups)

I think you're right about all this, and the socialist view often gets articulated (& formed) in reaction to proposals and rhetoric about increasing the government's authority to arrest/commit people WITHOUT any increase to the capacity or quality of mental health facilities. That won't solve much!

Happy February everyone!

Mamdani names reformer Stanley Richards to steer chaotic Rikers complex Exactly one month into his term, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has appointed a formerly incarcerated person to manage the facility.

Mayor Mamdani names criminal justice reformer Stanley Richards as NYC’s new Department of Correction commissioner

Richards is the first formerly incarcerated person to lead the city’s jails system

@gothamist.com @wnyc.org

gothamist.com/news/mamdani...

Williams seems like a weak incumbent (has never won a contested primary, raised only half as much money as Jalloh in the last 6 months). Might as well take a swing here rather than letting her take a pass for endorsing Sliwa on top of being generally awful, right?

YouTube video by Eyewitness News ABC7NY New York City digging out and melting snow piles

The streets of NYC are filled with giant snowbanks and temperatures are staying below freezing for the foreseeable future, so I was really glad to learn the city has a giant machine to melt snow down by dumping it into a hot tub-like contraption.

The Means-Testing Industrial Complex As Republicans tightened work requirements and eligibility rules for Medicaid and SNAP last year, Equifax’s CEO openly celebrated the profits to be made from administering this deprivation.

Today, Luke Farrell (@lukef.bsky.social) explains how complex eligibility requirements have turned America’s safety net into a lucrative revenue stream for monopolistic private contractors.

Really? I feel like if the law was accompanied by legislative findings about illegal and harmful behavior ICE had engaged in, and the type of character that would remain part of such an organization through all this, a court should (and maybe would) accept those findings as a rational basis.

Does Alvin Bragg still go to work? Is he even alive?

Very audacious of the @aclu.org to invoke free speech and posture against the Trump administration while at the same time it’s asking Trump’s NLRB to change labor law by restricting free speech rights at work. All this to avoid admitting it illegally fired an employee!

The ACLU Is Attempting to Limit the Speech Rights of All Private Sector Workers ACLU wants the Trump NLRB to reverse speech-protecting rulings.

Meanwhile the @aclu.org is asking Trump’s NLRB to change the law to restrict free speech rights at work because the alternative would be to admit it wrongfully fired a worker.

Trump-administration officials and MAGA influencers have repeatedly called these activists “violent” and said they are involved in “riots.” But the resistance in Minnesota is largely characterized by a conscious, strategic absence of physical confrontation. Activists have made the decision to emphasize protection, aid, and observation. When matters escalate, it is usually the choice of the federal agents. Of the three homicides in Minneapolis this year, two were committed by federal agents. “There’s been an incredible, incredible response from the community. I’ve seen our neighbors go straight from allies to family—more than family—checking in on each other, offering food and rides for kids and all kinds of support, alerting each other if there’s ICE or any kind of danger,” Malika Dahir, a local activist of Somali descent, told me. If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’” Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.

One thing I found deeply moving about resistance in the Twin Cities was the universalism of loving your neighbor, the philosophy driving the opposition to the ICE/BP invasion. I couldn't help but notice the contrast with the blood and soil-ism of Miller and Vance. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Memo to Mamdani: Bring Back the Weekend G Train to Forest Hills - Streetsblog New York City John Surico calls om Zohran Mamdani, Kathy Hochul and the MTA to restore weekend G train service to Forest Hills in Queens.

The G train has 50,000 more daily riders than it did in 2010—when the MTA cut service between Long Island City and Forest Hills.

@emilyassembly.bsky.social has led on this for years. I’m with her: bring it back. Read @johnsurico.bsky.social's s op-ed at @nyc.streetsblog.org.

Setting aside the difficulty of getting any constitutional amendment passed, I’m not sure an amendment restricting the pardon power would invalidate pre-enactment pardons due to the Ex Post Facto clause. At the least you’d have to draft it very carefully to explicitly override the EPF clause.

Thirty-one known defendants have been charged in Chicago with non-immigration crimes tied to “Operation Midway Blitz.”

With today’s acquittal, 15 of them have been cleared.

No one has been convicted.

You read things like this and you can only hope that when the time comes, if it comes, when it is your community's turn to be tested, that you acquit yourselves half as well.

What’s Behind the Staggering Drop in the Murder Rate? No One Knows for Sure.

Every politician across the U.S. is taking credit for their unique efforts that drove down the local crime rate, when in fact violent crime is plunging across the country. "The surge in violence in the early 2020s was a departure during a time of massive social upheaval, not a new normal."

Very interesting forthcoming article on state constitutional equivalents to the 4th Amendment, and how state courts do and don't interpret them, from Quinn Yeargain.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... #N

Trump Administration Drops Appeal in School D.E.I. Lawsuit

I'm not trying to track all the Trump administration's legal defeats, but it just happened again: Trump announced last year he was withholding billions of dollars in education funding from states with DEI programs. His administration got sued, lost, & is now dropping the appeal.

The Starbucks Union Won 125 Elections in 2025 NLRB data show that the Starbucks unionization drive is holding steady.

Despite stonewalling opposition from Starbucks, its workers around the country have continued to unionize at a fast rate. Each of the past four years, @sbworkersunited.org has won over 100 union elections and added thousands of workers to its ranks.

this is, obviously, a very strange way to get a message out to foreign officials when you have a State Department and a modern communication system that isn't restricted to the city of Washington DC

it suggests Rubio wouldn't do it and some chuds in the executive branch found a way to bypass him

If you’re cold, they’re cold, but you don’t have to let them in. - The third amendment

Flag of California. It features a grizzly bear walking atop a grassy field, a red star on the upper left, a red bar at the bottom, and the words "California Republic" all on a white background

Flag of Chernyshevsky District. It features blue and green regions on the background, white lines dividing them, and atop them, a golden flower(?) and an illustration of the dinosaur Kulindadromeus

Flag of Dornogovi. It features horizontal blue, yellow, and green stripes. On the top left is a blue-and-orange emblem with a white silhouette of a sauropod in it

Flag of Srednekolymsk. It features a red sun on the top right, a stylized river, and a red mammoth

Flags with extinct animals on them:
- California (California grizzly bear)
- Chernyshevsky District, Russia (Kulindadromeus)
- Doronogovi, Mongolia (sauropod)
- Srednekolymsk, Russia woolly (mammoth)