The American people are finishing casting their ballots today, and the only question is how great the repudiation of the Donald Trump-Elon Musk regime will be. Trump, Musk, and their AI-slop allies have spent over five billion dollars to defend Trump’s misrule and influence the policy landscape of the elections, but the fascistic inhumanity of their Big Brutal Box agenda been impossible to hide.

Facing a surging populist backlash against data centers and detention camps, the dork lords are desperate for the ICE and AI bubbles to stay inflated. They are pinning their hopes on BAAJA (S. 5653), an AI-powered bulldozer of a bill, passing in the lame duck. Under the anodyne guise of “permitting reform,” the bill would transfer untold public power to corporations and the Trump regime, all to feed the AI industry’s insatiable greed for energy, water, and land. The first vote is scheduled for Monday, November 9, less than a week away.

Big Oil lobbyists, Trump Energy Dominance Council members, and Williams gas-pipeline CEO Alan Armstrong, the temporary Senate replacement for Markwayne Mullin, are keeping the Republican caucus in line. On the putatively oppositional side of the aisle, Wall Street and Silicon Valley executives and lobbyists are working, mostly behind the scenes, to corral Democrats. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) are helping Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) manage the Senate; while the New Dems¹ and Rep. Josh Harder’s (D-Calif.) Build America Caucus oversee the House effort to ram the bill through.

But we will not let democracy die in dorkness.

Every day now, more defenders of democracy are sending up flares about BAAJA’s dark threat.

Last week, Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen wrote: “What Will BAAJA Do? Whatever the Trump Administration Wants.”

“BAAJA would create more legal runway for this president to make corrupt deals and greenlight harmful projects of all kinds,” Dillen warned. “The prospect of losing tools to slow down and stop the cruelest projects should be haunting everyone.”

“When democracies are at the cliff’s edge, among the most important guardrails are the law and the people’s ability to go to court and challenge the government that is turning against them,” Dillen concludes. “All of this to say, taking down the guardrails is a dangerously bad idea.”

In a recent letter, veteran climate attorney David Bookbinder confirmed the staggering scope of BAAJA, calling it "a serious threat to American democracy.”

Bookbinder, who has served as chief counsel for the center-right Niskanen Center and for the Sierra Club, and led an independent legal consultancy with former ExxonMobil climate policy manager David Bailey, summarized the legislation thusly:

Although he finds fault with every title of this brutal bill, Bookbinder is most concerned by Title IV, “Project Certainty,” which “beggars belief.”

“By placing corporations with any such federal permit not above the law so much as completely beyond its reach,” Bookbinder wrote, “these ‘project certainty’ provisions seriously threaten American democracy.”

BAAJA would hamper, if not altogether thwart, critical work by civil rights organizations to halt ICE’s dangerous expansion of immigrant detention, the Detention Watch Network warned yesterday. It would, instead, accelerate ICE’s deadly warehousing of Americans. The nation’s laws that wanton construction have been the one thing stopping ICE’s $45 billion detention-camp buildout:

However, if BAAJA passes, those laws limiting industrial construction would be effectively eliminated and the literal human warehousing will recommence.

“In the future, ICE could proceed with massive, irreversible projects like the warehouse detention expansion project with little oversight and no meaningful legal recourse,” the network writes.

The defenders of the heart of American democracy, Washington, D.C., are also wide awake to the BAAJA threat to the nation’s capital.²

“Anything where you’re altering the built environment or affecting areas covered by the National Historic Preservation Act, which of course there’s tons of those in D.C., will be much easier to bulldoze,” environmental attorney and former Justice Department counsel Matt Littleton explained to Politico’s Nico Portuondo yesterday. “That’s kind of the point of the bill.”

The D.C. Preservation League, an East Potomac plaintiff, said “the current requirements ensure that federal projects comply with the law and that eliminating enforcement mechanisms would diminish the public’s ability to hold the government accountable,” Portuondo reported:

“BAAJA is dangerous,” Free DC co-founder Keya Chatterjee, an experienced climate justice activist, told Hill Heat. “Trump just cut down hundreds of trees against a judge’s orders, wants drones and snipers in an arch pointed at where the March on Washington occurred, ran the Kennedy Center finances into the ground which made it shut down, made a mockery and a mess of the reflecting pool and the East Wing, and is egging on the data centers that are driving up electricity prices everywhere. Not a single senator should vote to remove guardrails that are preventing Trump from causing even more damage.”

Tonight, we can celebrate the work of defending democracy.

Tomorrow, we must tell Congress: NoDirtyDataCenterDeal.com.

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