Welcome to The Beat. I'm Melissa Murray in for Ari Melbur. We begin today with bracing warnings about Donald Trump's assault on constitutional limits and a sitting Supreme Court justice making a rare public statement about the impact on the judiciary. Without directly naming Trump, Justice Katanji Brown Jackson appeared to denounce the administration's repeated attacks on judges.

As she put it, to an audience of sitting federal judges and lawyers last night, Jackson said, quote,

The attacks are not random.

They seem designed to intimidate those of us who serve in this critical capacity,

and they ultimately risk

undermining our Constitution and the rule of law. I can report that I was at that event last

night, and the crowd was keenly focused on the justice's words. Jackson had been slated to give

brief remarks before settling into a longer conversation

with a sitting judge about her recent memoir.

She wound up speaking for a little over a quarter of an hour about the attacks on the

judiciary before pivoting to that conversation about her memoir.

At the end of the evening, the crowd gave Jackson a standing ovation.

On the same night that Justice Jackson made those comments, Donald Trump was in Alabama, and he had this to say.

The courts are trying to stop me from doing the job that I was elected to do, but they have to let us

do the job that the voters want us to do. Judges are interfering supposedly

based on due process. Meanwhile, this morning, Trump opened a new front on a different perceived

enemy with a legally dubious threat to enlist the IRS in his crusade against Harvard University.

Trump vowed he will be, quote, taking away Harvard's tax-exemptive. the IRS in his crusade against Harvard University.

Trump vowed he will be, quote, taking away Harvard's tax-exempt status.

As the Times reports, quote, federal law prohibits the president from directing the IRS to conduct tax investigations. At this hour, it is unclear if the IRS will follow Trump's

directive.

Today, Harvard called that move, quote, unlawful.

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