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EDWARD JACOBS

Author: Ed Jacobs

  • 6 April, 2025

    From the NYTimes Editorial Board today:

    In his attacks on law firms, universities and other American institutions, President Trump is relying on an illusion. The illusion is that the institutions are powerless to fight back and that they face a choice between principle and survival.

    These institutions do not have to capitulate to Mr. Trump. They have a realistic path to defeating his intimidation. Some law firms and others have begun to fight. In doing so, they have provided the beginnings of a playbook for standing up to his attempts to weaken core tenets of American democracy, including due process, free speech and the constitutional system of checks and balances.

    For anybody who is skeptical of this idea and sees Mr. Trump as all-powerful, it is worth recognizing that law firms have already won court rulings that block Mr. Trump’s executive orders against them. Many legal analysts believe that higher courts will likewise reject the orders as illegal. It is also worth remembering the many legal defeats of Mr. Trump’s first term. Courts, including the Supreme Court, rejected his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result; prevented him from adding a citizenship question to the census; and blocked his family-separation policy at the southern border. A grass-roots political movement helped defeat his effort to repeal Obamacare even though Republicans controlled both the House and Senate.

    Yes, Mr. Trump has adopted a more extreme approach to executive power in his second term. He has won some early policy victories, and he will win more. Nonetheless, he faces real constraints on his power. Indeed, the most likely path to American autocracy depends on not only a power-hungry president but also the voluntary capitulation of a cowed civil society. It depends on the mistaken belief that a president is invincible. Anybody who has dealt with a schoolyard bully should recognize this principle: The illusion of invincibility is often his greatest asset.

    We understand why the leaders of major institutions are nervous. Taking on the president of the United States requires courage. This is a moment for courage.

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    The playbook begins with a recognition that capitulation is doomed. Some law firms and corporations, as well as Columbia University, have made a different bet, obviously. But the example of law firms demonstrates the problems with capitulation.

    Mr. Trump has signed executive orders punishing several firms that have done nothing wrong. They have merely employed lawyers who represented Democrats, defended liberal causes or participated in investigations into Mr. Trump. The orders lack any meaningful legal argument and yet contain severe punishments. They seek to bar the firms’ lawyers from entering federal buildings and meeting with federal officials, provisions that would prevent the firms from representing many clients.

    One firm that was subject to an executive order — Paul, Weiss — surrendered and promised concessions, including $40 million in pro bono work for Trump-friendly causes. Three other firms — Milbank; Skadden, Arps; and Willkie Farr & Gallagher — proactively agreed to deals with the White House and made their own concessions.

    A crucial fact about these agreements is that they include no binding promises from the White House. Mr. Trump can threaten the firms again whenever he chooses and demand further concessions. These firms are in virtual receivership to Mr. Trump. So is Columbia, which yielded to Mr. Trump after he threatened its federal funding. The university did not even win the restoration of that funding when it agreed to his demands; it won merely permission to begin negotiating with the administration.

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    Mr. Trump’s influence over the compliant law firms should be especially chilling to their clients. The firms have just signaled their willingness to abandon clients that have fallen into disfavor with the federal government. That does not seem like a quality one would want in an attorney. “Once you make concessions once, it’s hard not to make them again,” Christopher Eisgruber, the president of Princeton University and a legal scholar by training, said when discussing the attacks on higher education.

    The second item in the playbook is an insistence on due process. The American legal system has procedures to deal with Mr. Trump’s various allegations against these institutions. If law firms are behaving inappropriately, courts can punish them. If a university is violating students’ civil rights — by tolerating antisemitism, for instance — the Justice Department can file charges. These processes allow each side to present evidence. They prevent abuse of power and establish ground rules that other organizations can follow.

    Mr. Trump may well win some cases that follow due process, and that is OK. Some universities have indeed allowed their Jewish students to be menaced. But the appropriate remedy is not the arbitrary cancellation of unrelated research funding, potentially slowing cures for cancer, heart disease, childhood illnesses and more. Columbia managed to adopt the wrong strategy in both directions. It was too slow to fix its problems and then prostrated itself to Mr. Trump. Other universities should both get their houses in order and stand ready to sue the administration.

    The three law firms that have filed suits to block Mr. Trump’s executive orders — Jenner & Block, Perkins Coie and WilmerHale — provide a model. So far, they are winning in court. Importantly, they have won the backing of many conservatives. As our counterparts on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote, Mr. Trump’s campaign against law firms “breaks a cornerstone principle of American justice.”

    Paul Clement, perhaps the most successful living Republican advocate at the Supreme Court, represents WilmerHale and wrote a thundering brief on its behalf. “It is thus a core principle of our legal system that ‘one should not be penalized for merely defending or prosecuting a lawsuit,’” Mr. Clement wrote, quoting a 1974 Supreme Court ruling. He described Mr. Trump’s orders as “an unprecedented assault on that bedrock principle.” Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, granted Mr. Clement’s request for a temporary restraining order.

    This pattern should give law firms confidence that they will continue to prevail, so long as they fight. The Supreme Court is deeply conservative on many issues and favors an expansive definition of executive power. But it has defied Mr. Trump before, and conservative legal experts who share the court’s outlook are aghast at his assault on the legal system.

    Any institution that stands up to Mr. Trump should be prepared to make sacrifices. Universities may have to spend more of their endowments, as they do during economic downturns. Law-firm partners may lose some income. But they can afford it; partners at Paul, Weiss made $6.6 million on average in 2023. One mistake that the submissive law firms made was imagining they had any chance of emerging unscathed once Mr. Trump targeted them. Fighting him has costs, and surrendering has costs. Already, some students at top law schools say they will no longer interview with firms like Skadden. “We’re not looking to sacrifice our moral values,” one student at Georgetown University said.

    Finally, the playbook calls for solidarity, especially for institutions that Mr. Trump has not (yet) targeted. The initial response to his executive orders from many other law firms has been the opposite of solidarity. They reportedly tried to steal clients and hire lawyers from the threatened firms. Most big firms also refused to sign a legal brief in defense of their industry. Their meekness is ultimately self-defeating. The campaign to subdue law firms will either be defeated or it will expand.

    We are glad to see that other firms have spoken up. Even better, a few firms — Williams & Connolly, Cooley and Clement & Murphy — are representing the three fighting the executive orders. Corporate executives can also make a difference by making clear, even privately, that they will not abandon any law firm that Mr. Trump attacks. The business world has much at stake. The United States is home to an outsize share of financial and corporate activity partly because investors have confidence that the rule of law prevails here. If political power instead supersedes signed contracts and the rule of law, American business will suffer.

    Standing up to the abuse of power is inherently difficult. It can also be inspiring. People who do so often look back proudly on their actions and are justly celebrated for it after a crisis has passed. But crises usually do not end on their own. Resolving them requires courage and action.

  • 2 April, 2025

    It appears that Heather Cox Richardson’s posts on Facebook are not available any longer. Since she continues to post, but the posts disappear, one can only conclude that Facebook is removing her posts. Here is her post from substack which arrived in my emailbox this morning:

    “Today Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made history.

    For more than 25 hours he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or children’s literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent, powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is destroying our democracy.

    On the same day that John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that members of Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including national security advisor Michael Waltz, have been skirting presidential records laws and exposing national security by using Gmail accounts to conduct government business, and the same day that mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Booker launched a full-throated defense of the United States of America.

    Booker began his marathon speech at 7:00 on the evening of March 31 with little fanfare. In a video recorded before he began, he said that he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.”

    On the floor of the Senate, Booker again invoked the late Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who had been one of the original Freedom Riders challenging racial segregation in 1961 and whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 as Lewis joined the marchers on their way to Montgomery to demand their voting rights be protected.

    Booker reminded listeners that Lewis was famous for telling people to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Help redeem the soul of America.” Booker said that in the years since Trump took office, he has been asking himself, “[H]ow am I living up to his words?”

    “Tonight I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis and I believe that not in a partisan sense,” he said, “because so many of the people that have been reaching out to my office in pain, in fear, having their lives upended—so many of them identify themselves as Republicans.”

    Standing for the next 25 hours and 5 minutes, without a break to use the restroom and pausing only when colleagues asked questions to enable him to rest his voice, Booker called out the Trump administration’s violations of the Constitution and detailed the ways in which the administration is hurting Americans. Farmers have lost government contracts, putting them in a financial crisis. Cuts to environmental protections that protect clean air and water are affecting Americans’ health. Housing is unaffordable, and the administration is making things worse. Cuts to education and medical research and national security breaches have made Americans less safe. The regime accidentally deported a legal resident because of “administrative error” and now says it cannot get him back.

    “These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such,” he said. “This is our moral moment. This is when the most precious ideas of our country are being tested…. Where does the Constitution live, on paper or in our hearts?”

    Throughout his speech, Booker emphasized the power of the American people. He told their stories and read their letters. And he urged them to stand up for the country. “In this democracy,” he said, “the power of people is greater than the people in power.”

    He emphasized the power of the people by calling out South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who until today held the record for the longest Senate speech: a filibuster he launched in 1957 to try to stop the passage of that year’s Civil Rights Act. Thurmond spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes, but unlike Booker, who used his time to make a powerful and coherent case for reclaiming American democracy, Thurmond filled time with tactics like reading from an encyclopedia.

    But, Booker noted, Thurmond’s attempt to stop racial equality failed. After he ended his filibuster, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and Black Americans and their allies used it to demand the equal protection of the law, including the right to vote. “I’m not here…because of his speech,” Booker said. “I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”

    “It is time to heed the words of the man I began this whole thing with: John Lewis. I beg folks to take his example of his early days when he made himself determined to show his love for his country at a time the country didn’t love him, to love this country so much, to be such a patriot that he endured beatings, savagely, on the Edmund Pettus bridge, at lunch counters, on freedom rides. He said he had to do something. He would not normalize a moment like this. He would not just go along with business as usual. He wouldn’t know how to solve it, but there’s one thing that he would do, that I hope we all can do, that I think I did a little bit of tonight.

    “He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation. I want you to redeem the dream…. Let’s be bolder in America with a vision that inspires with hope. It starts with the people of the United States of America—that’s how this country started: ‘We the people.’ Let’s get back to the ideals that others are threatening, let’s get back to our founding documents…. Those imperfect geniuses had some very special words at the end of the Declaration of Independence…when our founders said we must mutually pledge, pledge to each other ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.’ We need that now from all Americans. This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right, it’s right or wrong.

    “Let’s get in good trouble.

    “My friend, madam president, I yield the floor.”

    According to Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, before he was through, Booker’s speech had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.

    The people spoke today in special elections. Republican candidates in Florida won by about 14 points in each of two U.S. House races, but just five months ago, Republicans won those seats by 30 and 37 points. It appears that voters are angry at the Republican Party.

    In Wisconsin, the state supreme court race showed a similar dynamic. The candidate endorsed by President Trump and backed by more than $20 million from Elon Musk, lost the race to his opponent, circuit court judge Susan Crawford. Musk had campaigned in the state for Crawford’s opponent, handing out two $1 million checks and saying that the election could determine “the future of America and Western Civilization.”

    Crawford won by about 10 points.

    “As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls,” Crawford said in her victory speech, “I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won.”

    —

    Notes:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/01/waltz-national-security-council-signal-gmail

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/01/health-human-services-hhs-mass-layoffs-updates/82754402007

    https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/cory-booker-senate-filibuster-time-record-b2725556.html

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/01/us/politics/booker-senate-trump.html

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5227136-democrats-wisconsin-florida-special-elections

    https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-wisconsin-supreme-court-election-loss-2053668

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/us/elon-musk-wisconsin-supreme-court.html

    https://www.wkow.com/news/top-stories/what-does-susan-crawfords-win-mean-for-the-wisconsin-supreme-court/article_e34ff316-7299-40d4-a440-6e56478a5693.html

    Bluesky: drewharwell.com/post/3lls2yurefk2x

    YouTube: watch?v=vXdqHXbp04s

    https://www.youtube.com/playlist

    watch?v=uCjQUOT-rXQ

  • 30 March, 2025

    From Robert Reich’s daily posting:

    “Friends,

    The past week has been another horror show, and I share your anxiety and sleeplessness.

    But the past week also reveals the utter incompetence of Trump and his regime.

    Even The Wall Street Journal criticized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for trying to dismiss “Signalgate” as a hoax, calls Trump negotiator Steve Witkoff “out of his depth in dealing with world crises,” and condemns the administration for thinking “it can bully its way through anything by shouting Fake News.”

    Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) instructs the administration to “own it and fix it.”

    During the ensuing uproar, Witkoff goes off the deep end, telling Tucker Carlson that Vladimir Putin is “straight up” and not a “bad guy,” claiming he’s “100 percent” certain Russia “doesn’t want to overrun Europe,” and embracing Russia’s claim that people in the seized Ukrainian territory “want to be under Russian rule.”

    Now that Trump has demanded that Greenland surrender to America, Greenlanders are so adamant they don’t want JD Vance and his wife to visit that the second couple end up visiting only a frigid U.S. military base there.

    Meanwhile, just as measles is spreading and avian flu threatens, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services cuts 20,000 jobs and dramatically scales back the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The White House cancels funding for studies of antiviral drugs and vaccines to fight future pandemics, as well as grants to track infectious diseases. It hires a man who promotes the false claim that immunization causes autism to do a study on the topic. And the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official resigns under pressure, calling Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s stance on vaccines irresponsible and dangerous. “This man doesn’t care about the truth,” says the official. “He cares about what is making him followers.”

    Elon continues to attack Social Security, with phone wait times growing even longer.

    The stock market continues its meltdown.

    Amid the turmoil, Trump expresses his wish at a Women’s History Month event to “be known as the fertilization president.” He complains that a portrait of him in the Colorado state capitol is “purposefully distorted.” He attacks a law firm because it once employed a lawyer who worked on a Justice Department probe of Trump during his first term. He’s imposing sweeping “reciprocal tariffs” that he says will substitute for income taxes. He attacks the “absolutely terrible” work of Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich because she asked on air about the propriety of Trump hosting a Tesla marketing event at the White House. He orders proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections — a power the Constitution assigns to the states and Congress. He launches a barrage of orders against California and issues a new cryptocurrency coin to further enrich himself and his family.

    Just this week.

    It would all be comic if not so tragic.

    Is it any wonder that the special election in Florida’s 6th Congressional District is now trending blue, with Republican Randy Fine’s former lead over Democrat Josh Weil disappearing — despite the heavy GOP tilt of the district?

    Or that Trump is so afraid of losing his House majority that he pulled Elise Stefanik back from her plumb United Nations ambassadorial job so she’d remain in Congress?

    I don’t want to minimize the cruelty or pain being inflicted by Trump and his cronies, but this week has also revealed a foolishness — a mindless obtuseness — in Trump and this regime that defies belief.

    These people know zilch about governing, which is both laughable and terrifying.”

  • 25 March, 2025

    From Robert Reich’s substack of this morning:

    “Friends,

    I was talking yesterday to a friend who’s a professor at Columbia University about what’s been happening there. He had a lot to say. When he needed to run off to an appointment, I asked him if he’d text or email me the rest of his thoughts. His response floored me. “No,” he said. “I better not. They may be reviewing it.” 

    “Who’s ‘they’?” I asked, suddenly worried. 

    “They! The university! The government! Gotta go!” He was off. 

    My friend has never before shown signs of paranoia. 

    I relate this to you because the Trump regime is starting to have a chilling effect on what and how Americans communicate with each another. It is beginning to create mass paranoia, which is exactly what Trump intends. 

    The chill affects the four pillars of civil society — universities, science, the media, and the law. 

    Start with America’s major universities. Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s demands that the university identify every demonstrator and put its department of Middle Eastern studies under “receivership” — or else lose $400 million in government funding — is chilling communications there. 

    The Trump regime also “detained” a Columbia University graduate student and green card holder without criminal charges merely for participating in protests at the school. The regime’s agents have also entered dorms with search warrants and announced the “removal” of two other students who participated in such protests.

    Other major universities are on Trump’s target list. 

    Now, consider science. Trump has mounted a direct attack on the three biggest funders of American science — the Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation. 

    Tens of thousands of researchers are now worried about how to continue their research. Many have decided to hunker down and not criticize the Trump regime. 

    Meanwhile, Philippe Baptiste, the French minister for higher education, has charged that a French scientist traveling to a conference near Houston earlier this month was denied entry into the United States because his phone contained message exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he gave a negative “personal opinion” about Trump’s scientific and research policies. (The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denies this was the reason the scientist wasn’t admitted into the country.)

    Next, the media. Major media fear more lawsuits from Trump and his political allies in the wake of ABC’s surrender in December, paying Trump $15 million to settle a defamation case Trump filed against the network. 

    Journalists who cover the White House are still reeling from Trump’s decision to bar those deemed unfriendly from major events where space is limited.

    Finally, the legal community. Trump’s attack began a week and a half ago with an executive order penalizing one of America’s premier law firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison — stripping security clearances for the firm’s lawyers, limiting them from entering government buildings (which could include federal courthouses) or getting government jobs, and terminating the firm’s federal government contracts. Trump also implied he would penalize Paul Weiss’ clients. 

    The order followed on Trump targeting two other big law firms, Covington and Burling and Perkins Coie.

    What had Paul Weiss and the other firms targeted by Trump done? All three are filled with prominent, establishment Democrats who have engaged in partisan activity against Trump and the Republicans.

    Brad Karp himself was a major Democratic donor who worked last year to elect Kamala Harris, even helping her in debate prep. Mark Pomerantz, a former attorney with the firm, participated in a criminal case against Trump in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.

    Soon thereafter, Trump gave a grievance-filled speech at the Justice Department, charging that “a corrupt group of hacks and radicals” wrongly prosecuted him during the Biden administration and he was preparing new executive actions to personally target the “violent vicious lawyers” who had opposed him. 

    This past Thursday, Trump withdrew the executive order against Paul Weiss because, he said, the firm had “acknowledged the wrongdoing” of Pomerantz and pledged $40 million in free legal work to support the Trump administration. 

    Then on Friday, Trump broadened his campaign of retaliation against the legal community with a memorandum directing the heads of the Justice and Homeland Security Departments to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States” (for “the United States,” read “Trump”). 

    The resulting chill is widespread. Sunday’s Politicoreported that “virtually no one with any long-term standing in the private legal community is willing to speak publicly about [the memorandum], partly out of fear that they or their firms could wind up in Trump’s crosshairs.”

    Friends, the chill is the point. 

    Trump wants university students to be so intimidated they won’t demonstrate against him; professors, so intimidated they won’t criticize his policies in the classroom; scientists, so intimidated they won’t denounce him even privately; the media, so intimidated they’ll refrain from reporting unfavorably about him; and lawyers, so intimidated they won’t support political rivals or litigate against him. 

    Trump is even seeking to intimidate the arts — another pillar of civil society — by taking over the Kennedy Center, firing board members, ousting its president, and making himself chairman. 

    Comedian Nikki Glaser, one of the few celebrities to walk the red carpet at this year’s Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize event, told reporters she now thinks twice before doing political jokes directed at Trump. “Like, you just are scared that you’re gonna get doxxed and death threats or who knows where this leads, like, detained. Honestly that’s not even like a joke. It’s like a real fear.” 

    Every tyrant in history has sought to stifle criticism of himself and his regime. 

    But America was founded on criticism. American democracy was built on dissent. We conducted a revolution against tyranny. 

    This moment calls for courage and collective action — not capitulation — by universities, scientists, journalists, the legal community, and the arts. 

    Courage in that university presidents, prestigious scientists, media enterprises, the managing partners of law firms, and artists must not back down. To the contrary, they should stand up to his intimidation and sound the alarm about what Trump is trying to do. 

    Collective action in that universities, scientists, the media, the legal community, and the arts must join forces to condemn Trump’s attempts to stifle dissent and criticism. 

    Every institution, group, firm, or individual that surrenders to Trump’s wanton tyranny invites more of it.“

  • 23 March, 2025

    From a post by Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor,

    “Friends,

    Yesterday, Trump dismantled much of the Department of Education. He ordered wrestling executive-turned-Education Secretary Linda McMahon to shut most of her department, although student loans and special education funding will continue.

    His executive order will effectively destroy a $100 billion-a-year executive department created by Congress under President Jimmy Carter 45 years ago.

    But there’s a much larger story here.

    Combine this with Trump’s attacks on higher education — his gutting the funding of the National Institutes of Health (which provides a large portion of biomedical research) and the National Science Foundation (engineering and computer research) and his effective closure of USAID (which underwrites research in global diseases).

    Put this together with Trump’s attacks on the freedom of speech of university students and professors.

    And with Trump’s (and RFK Jr.’s) attacks on vaccine science.

    With Trump’s and right-wing governors’ attacks on teaching the truth in our schools about America’s history of slavery and Native American genocide.

    Combine this with Trump’s attack on America’s libraries — last week’s executive order mandating cuts in the funding of libraries around the country — which will jeopardize literacy development and reading programs, reliable internet access for those without it at home, and homework help and other resources for students and educators.

    And his attacks on America’s museums (the same executive order cut their funding, too). And his attack on the arts, as illustrated by Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center (last month, he announced himself its new chair, replaced 13 board members, and inserted a new interim president).

    What’s the larger picture?

    Not an “attack on the liberal state,” as I keep reading. Not “the culmination of Trump’s culture wars.” Certainly not that Trump is seeking “small government” over “big government” or advancing traditional conservatism over traditional liberalism.

    What’s really occurring is an attack on the American mind.

    Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited the enslaved from learning to read. Nazis burned books. Putin and Xi censor the media.

    Ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny.

    Those who believe in democracy, on the other hand, have been at the forefront of the movement for free, universal public education and for public libraries, museums, and the arts.

    They understand that democracy depends on people knowing what’s occurring around them and having the capacity to deliberate critically about it.

    Trump is only the frontman in this attack on the American mind.

    The attack is really coming from the anti-democracy movement: from JD Vance and from Vance’s major financial backer, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who staked $15 million on Vance’s Ohio senatorial election in 2022 and helped convince Trump to make Vance vice president. And from Thiel’s early business partner, Elon Musk.

    Thiel is a self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

    Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.

    Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian group of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.

    Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone to being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s social order.

    In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

    Make no mistake: Trump’s attack on the American mind — on education, science, libraries, and museums — is an attack on the capacity of Americans for self-government.

    It is coming from the oligarchs of the techno-state who believe democracy is inefficient and want to replace it with an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.Be warned.”

  • 20 March, 2025

    “The administration’s attempt to ignore the laws the Constitution charges it with executing amounts to an attack on the right of the American people to establish the rules under which we live.”

    That from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, dated March 19, 2025.

  • 19 March, 2025

    What a day it was yesterday. So brazen, so illegal, so outrageous. I’ll let Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American post from early this a.m. serve as a summary of this one day. And we’ll all still wait to find out if there is actually a way to enforce our Judiciary’s rule of law, or if this Congress will stand up for itself.

    By Heather Cox Richardson: On Saturday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered that the Trump administration stop deporting anyone from the United States under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and that the planes carrying individuals to prison in El Salvador be turned around. Despite the order, the administration declined to bring the planes back, and administration officials appeared to mock the order, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposting the message of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele that read, “Oopsie… Too late,” along with a laughing emoji.

    On Sunday, lawyers from the Department of Justice suggested that the planes were outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. when Boasberg issued the order, or that the order didn’t take effect until it was entered into the electronic docket, although his verbal order that he said had to be “complied with immediately” came about 45 minutes earlier, before at least one of the planes landed.

    On Monday the Justice Department unsuccessfully asked a federal appeals court to remove Boasberg from the case. In a hearing, Boasberg asked the administration to clarify its actions after it appeared to defy the court by rushing the planes off the ground and to El Salvador. In response to the Justice Department’s claim that the judge’s orders had no authority over the flights once they left U.S. airspace, the judge noted that the power of the federal courts does not end at the end of U.S. airspace. Boasberg also appeared to reject the claim of the DOJ lawyers that there is no judicial order until it is published in a written filing. The DOJ also refused to tell Boasberg anything about the flights, saying that even their number was a question of national security, although the administration had talked extensively about them on public media.

    Boasberg scheduled another hearing today to get the DOJ lawyers to answer the questions they had refused to address.

    This morning, President Donald Trump took to social media to call Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President—He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”

    Trump’s post sounds as if he is nervous about the increasing unrest over his policies and is trying to convince people that he has a mandate although in fact more people voted for other candidates in the 2024 election than voted for him. But it was his suggestion that any judge with whom he disagrees should be removed that sparked pushback from Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, who issued a statement saying: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

    Roberts wrote the Trump v. United States decision of July 1, 2024, establishing that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of their official presidential duties, and it seems likely that Trump did not expect a rebuke from him.

    U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang also sought to stop the administration’s power grab. In a scathing 68-page decision, Chuang found that the actions of Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” to destroy the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways.” Chuang explained that the destruction of USAID hurt not only the 26 current or recently fired employees and contractors of USAID who had filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” That destruction also hurt “the public interest, because they deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress.”

    While the question of who is in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is such a mystery that it has spawned its own social media hashtag—WITAOD, for “Who is the administrator of DOGE?”—Chuang clearly identified Elon Musk as the person in charge. Trump “identified Musk as the leader of DOGE,” he notes, and “Trump and Musk held a joint press conference in the Oval Office to answer reporters’ questions about DOGE.” Chuang noted the many, many times when Trump called Musk DOGE’s leader.

    In the lawsuit, USAID employees argued that Musk has acted as an officer of the United States without having been duly appointed to such a role. The Constitution provides that the president can appoint such officers, who exercise “significant authority,” but that they must be confirmed with the advice and consent of the Senate. Musk, quite obviously, was not. The White House has tried to get around this issue by claiming that Musk is only an advisor to the president, but Chuang wasn’t buying it. “[B]ased on the present record,” he wrote, “the only individuals known to be associated with the decisions to initiate a shutdown of USAID…are Musk and DOGE team Members.” Musk therefore “exercises actual authority in ways that an advisor to the President does not.”

    Chuang ordered that parts of USAID must be restored, although what effect that will have is unclear since the agency has been destroyed.

    Trump continued his attack on the rule of law today when he fired the two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, which protects consumers from collusion and anti-consumer practices. The firings leave only two Republicans on the commission and leave it without a quorum to do business. Beginning with the 1935 case of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the courts have established that the president cannot fire officials in agencies created by Congress without a serious reason like neglect of duties. Legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern wrote: “Trump’s action here is brazenly illegal under any interpretation of the law as it stands.”

    Trump held a phone conversation today with Russian president Vladimir Putin, allegedly about a proposed ceasefire in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump boasted that he would end Russia’s war against Ukraine in a day, and he is now eager for any end to the hostilities. But Putin seems less eager to reach a solution than to demonstrate his dominance over Trump. Today, when the phone call was scheduled, Putin was on stage at an event. When his interviewer asked if he needed to go because he would be late for the call, Putin dismissed the question and laughter broke out. Brett Bruen, president of the Global Situation Room public relations firm wrote: “Making leaders wait is an old Putin power play. But, this is pretty brutal. Putin is publicly mocking Trump.”

    While Trump’s team portrayed the conversation as productive, Putin maintained that Ukraine was the aggressor in the war, although it was Russia that invaded Ukraine. Putin also demanded that the U.S. and allies must stop all military aid and the sharing of intelligence with Ukraine, conditions that would hamstring Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion.

    Finally today, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has proposed addressing the H5N1 bird flu that is decimating U.S. poultry and cattle farms by simply letting the disease run rampant. He suggests such a course would permit scientists to discover birds that are immune to the disease.

    But veterinary scientists say that letting the virus sweep through flocks is “a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” as Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times. Chickens and turkeys don’t have the genes to resist the virus, and every infection is a chance for the virus to mutate into a more virulent form, one of which could mutate so it could spread among humans. If H5N1 were permitted to infect 5 million birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Hansen told Mandavilli.

    The danger of this shoot first, ask questions later attitude of administration officials was on display today in articles about the men deported to El Salvador. A Washington Post article by Silvia Foster-Frau followed the story of four Venezuelan friends who had come to the U.S. illegally. They shared a townhouse in Dallas, where immigration officials picked them up last Thursday. The men signed deportation papers, expecting to return to Venezuela, but although there is no record that the men committed crimes in the U.S. and their families insist they are not affiliated with the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang whose members White House officials claim were on the weekend’s deportation flights, the men are shown in the videos of those deported to prison in El Salvador.

    A Reuters story by Sarah Kinosian and Kristina Cooke reported that family members who suspect their loved ones have been sent to El Salvador have launched a WhatsApp helpline.

    —

    Notes:

    https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/16/deport-support-venezuela-el-salvador-00232379

    https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/17/judge-boasberg-trump-deportation-hearing-00234945

    https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5202045-trump-judicial-impeachment

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

    https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.576293/gov.uscourts.mdd.576293.73.0.pdf

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/us/politics/elon-musk-usaid-doge-unconstitutional.html

    What Is Humphrey’s Executor and Why Should You Care About It?

    https://www.newsweek.com/watch-putin-laughs-upon-being-told-hes-running-late-trump-call-2046618

    Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance: Deportations: It’s not where it starts, it’s where it ends.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/18/trump-putin-ukraine-peace-talks

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/health/kennedy-bird-flu.html

    https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-fires-both-democratic-commissioners-ftc-sources-say-2025-03-18

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/03/18/trump-migrants-venezuelans-deportation-bukele

    https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/relatives-missing-venezuelan-migrants-desperate-answers-after-us-deportations-el-2025-03-17

  • 18 March, 2025

    Read this.

    The separation of powers is a central tenet of our system of government. This is something that was taught in elementary school when I was a child. Each of the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches are a check and balance on the other branches’ potential overreach of power. For sure, our history has seen many examples of one branch testing the limits of those checks. But, I believe, never more blatantly than the current Executive branch’s blatant refusal to acknowledge the power of the Judicial branch.

    I am not alone in feeling deep, profound, elemental concern for the reality that the Justice Department, apparently no longer operating independently of the Executive branch, will not be a reliable enforcer of the Judicial branch’s rulings. Together with the fact that the Legislative branch has also ceased to operate independently of the Executive branch, we are, as a country, no longer operating under rule of law.

    I don’t know how laws get enforced when the single ruling entity refuses to enforce its own laws. We seem to be in a fascist state now.

  • 16 March, 2025

    From for Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, on his substack:

    Robert Reich – A Sunday thoughtDownload

  • 15 March, 2025

    From Ralph Nader, who paints with far too broad a brush, blaming everyone under the sun for everything–but his point about the danger of staying silent is nonetheless well taken:

    March 14, 2025

    There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice.

    Start with the once-powerful Bush family dynasty. They despise Trump as he does them. Rich and comfortable George W. Bush is very proud of his Administration’s funding of AIDS medicines saving lives in Africa and elsewhere. Trump, driven by vengeance and megalomania, moved immediately to dismantle this program. Immediate harm commenced to millions of victims in Africa and elsewhere who are reliant on this U.S. assistance (including programs to lessen the health toll on people afflicted by tuberculosis and malaria).

    Not a peep from George W. Bush, preoccupied with his landscape painting and perhaps occasional pangs of guilt from his butchery in Iraq. His signal program is going down in flames and he keeps his mouth shut, as he has largely done since the upstart loudmouth Trump ended the Bush family’s power over the Republican Party.

    Then there are the Clintons and Obama. They are very rich, and have no political aspirations. Yet, though horrified by what they see Trump doing to the government and its domestic social safety net services they once ruled, mum’s the word.

    What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state? Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator—declaring war on the American people with his firings and smashing of critical “people’s programs” that benefit liberals and conservatives, red state and blue state residents alike.

    Do they fear being discomforted by Trump/Musk unleashing hate and threats against them, and getting tarred by Trump’s tirades and violent incitations? No excuses. Regard for our country must take precedence to help galvanize their own constituencies to resist tyranny and fight for Democracy.

    What about Kamala Harris — the hapless loser to Trump in November’s presidential election? She must think she has something to say on behalf of the 75 million people who voted for her or against Trump. Silence! She is perfect bait for Trump’s intimidation tactics. She is afraid to tangle with Trump despite his declining polls, rising inflation, the falling stock market and anti-people budget slashing which is harming her supporters and Trump voters’ economic wellbeing, health and safety.

    This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege.

    Why aren’t we hearing from Gary Gensler, former head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), now being dismantled, especially since the SEC is dropping his cases against alleged cryptocurrency crooks?

    Why aren’t we hearing much more (she wrote one op-ed) from Samantha Power, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) under Biden, whose life-saving agency is literally being illegally closed down, but for pending court challenges?

    Why aren’t we hearing from Michael Regan, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under Biden about saboteur Lee Zeldin, Trump’s head of EPA, who is now giving green lights to lethal polluters and other environmental destructions?

    These and many other former government officials all have their own circles – in some cases, millions of people – who need to hear from them.

    They can take some courage of the seven former I.R.S. Commissioners — from Republican and Democratic Administrations — who condemned slicing the I.R.S staff in half and aiding and abetting big time tax evasion by the undertaxed super-rich and giant corporations. I am told that they would be eager to testify, should the Democrats in Congress have the energy to hold unofficial hearings as ranking members of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees.

    Banding together is one way of reducing the fear factor. After Trump purged the career military at the Pentagon to put his own “yes men” at the top, five former Secretaries of Defense, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, sent a letter to Congress denouncing Trump’s firing of senior military officers and requesting “immediate” House and Senate hearings to “assess the national security implications of Mr. Trump’s dismissals.” Not a chance by the GOP majority there. But they could ask the Democrats to hold UNOFFICIAL HEARINGS as ranking members of the Armed Services Committees!

    Illinois Governor JB Pritzker can be one of the prime witnesses at these hearings – he has no fear of speaking his mind against the Trumpsters.

    On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.”

    She writes: “The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth] fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”

    To be sure, government employees and other unions are speaking out and suing in federal court. So are national citizen groups like Public Citizen and the Center for Constitutional Rights, though hampered in alerting large audiences by newspapers like the Times rarely reporting their initiatives.

    Yes, Ms. Bumiller, pay attention to that aspect of your responsibility. Moreover, the Times’ editorial page (op-ed and editorials) are not adequately reflecting the urgency of her reporting. Nor are her reporters covering the informed outspokenness and actions of civic organizations.

    Don’t self-censoring people know that they are helping the Trumpian dread, threat and fear machine get worse? Study Germany and Italy in the nineteen thirties.

    The Trump/Musk lawless, cruel, arrogant, dictatorial regime is in our White House. Their police state infrastructure is in place. Silence is complicity!