Monday, June 2, 2025

What the Law Allows

In so holding, the court does not pass upon the wisdom or likely effectiveness of the President’s use of tariffs as leverage. That use is impermissible not because it is unwise or ineffective, but because [the law] does not allow it.

- US Court of International Trade,
rejecting Trump's emergency tariffs

This week's featured post is "Are Trump's Tariffs Legal?"

This week everybody was talking about tariffs

That's the subject of the featured post. The decision of the US Court for International Trade revolves around what powers Trump has and how he exercises them. In the conclusion I note that there are legal ways to achieve Trump's legitimate purposes, but he has chosen illegal ways that put him into conflict with the courts.

You can view that tendency in a sinister way, as Trump seeking conflict as he angles toward dictatorial power. But the Atlantic's David Graham puts a different spin on it.

Some of Trump’s most notable collisions with the law and courts are less a product of him wanting powers that he doesn’t have than about him wanting things to happen faster than his powers allow. The president has a great deal of leeway to enforce immigration laws, but he is unwilling to wait while people exercise their right to due process, so instead he tries to just erase that right.

Trump could lay off many federal workers using the legally prescribed Reductions in Force procedure; instead, he and Elon Musk have attempted to fire workers abruptly, with the result that judges keep blocking the administration. Similarly, Trump could try to get Congress to close the Education Department or rescind funding for NPR, especially given the sway Trump holds over Republicans in both the House and the Senate. Instead, he has tried to do those things by executive fiat. Last week, a judge blocked his effort to shut down the department, and this week, NPR sued the administration over the attempt to slash funding, arguing that only Congress can claw back funds it has appropriated.

and Elon's last day

Another SpaceX Starship rocket failed Tuesday. Friday was Elon Musk's official last day as a "special government employee", a status which was always supposed to have a 130-days-per-year time limit -- pretty close to the time since Trump's inauguration on January 21.

Trump and Musk marked the occasion with a joint Oval Office press conference. Send-offs are times for reflection, and this one raises a bunch of questions.

Is he really leaving? Trump says no, for what that's worth.

Elon is really not leaving,” Trump said. “He’s going to be back and forth. I think I have a feeling [DOGE is] his baby, and I think he’s going to be doing a lot of things.

It's hard to know how seriously to take that. On the one hand, Musk is still the richest man in the world and can single-handedly finance campaigns at multiple levels. He still owns X/Twitter, which is a powerful force for injecting his point of view into the public mind. So if he wants to have influence in politics, he can.

On the other hand, Musk's time as the face of the (mostly illegal) DOGE firings and budget cuts has probably not been a fun experience for him. He's been widely vilified. Trump may well see Musk as a used-up shield. He absorbed blame from Trump's policies, but became so unpopular that Trump may well not want to be linked with him going forward.

Tesla sales have crashed, as potential buyers began associating the company's cars with Musk's politics. He blew $20-some million losing a Wisconsin Supreme Court race in which he led rallies himself.

It had to hurt when fellow mega-billionaire Bill Gates said:

The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one. I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money

Seeing the New York Times publicize his drug use was probably also not fun.

So Musk may look back on his involvement in government as an unpleasant mistake. Time will tell.

What did he accomplish for the country? For the conservative cut-government-spending movement, not much. He came in promising to find $2 trillion of waste, fraud, and inefficiency. But in spite of all the people he fired or tried to fire, numbers of that size were never on the table. In the end, DOGE claimed it had saved $160 billion, but even that number was inflated. CBS reported an estimate from Partnership for Public Service that balanced that $160 billion with $135 billion in additional costs, resulting in a net savings of $25 billion. Once you factor in lost revenue (like the additional taxes those fired IRS employees might have collected) DOGE may have increased the federal deficit.

In addition, much of what Musk cut had real value, like medical research and the food and medical aid that Gates was talking about. Michelle Goldberg writes:

There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred the United States Agency for International Development. Though a rump operation is operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.

What did he accomplish for himself? Quite a bit. The most obvious benefit Musk has obtained from the Trump administration was to stop government investigations into his companies.

Since the start of the second Trump administration, federal agencies that had scrutinized Musk and his business empire in recent years have begun to look a lot different. At the Department of Agriculture, for example, President Donald Trump fired the person who had been investigating the Musk company Neuralink. At other agencies including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump and Musk have tried to slash the number of employees — potentially hobbling those regulators’ ability to enforce the law against companies including Musk’s Tesla and X.

In the past few months, Trump’s Justice Department has dropped a case against Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and his Labor Department has canceled a planned civil rights review of his automaker, Tesla. Another regulatory matter against SpaceX has entered settlement talks with the National Labor Relations Board.

And in more than 40 other federal agency matters, regulators have taken no public action on their investigations for several months or more — raising questions about whether those cases may have become dormant, according to an NBC News review of regulatory matters involving Musk’s companies. Those matters range widely, from safety investigations into Tesla’s “self-driving” features to alleged workplace safety violations at SpaceX.

In addition, numerous government contracts have gone to Musk companies, like Starlink and SpaceX.

So maybe the $277 million he spent on the Trump campaign was a good investment.

and Ukraine's well designed raid

Just a few months after Pearl Harbor, American spirits were lifted by a daring bombing raid on Tokyo, which everyone -- including the Japanese -- had believed was out of range. It became known as the Doolittle Raid, after its leader, Jimmy Doolittle. Doolittle's team figured out how to launch the ordinarily land-based B-25 bomber from an aircraft carrier, then maneuvered the carrier close enough to make the attempt. All 16 planes were lost, but Doolittle got the Medal of Honor for the propaganda victory.

Sunday, Ukraine launched a similarly audacious attack, as it smuggled 117 drones close enough to Russian air bases deep in Siberia that it could destroy dozens of the Russian bombers that had been hitting Ukraine. The attacks hit three separate air bases. Ukraine claims to have damaged 40 Russian aircraft, and says that all drone operators are now safely out of Russia.

and you also might be interested in ...

I wouldn't have guessed that this would be the insult that landed hard on Trump's psyche.

Whenever Trump announces massive tariffs, stock prices plunge. But then something almost always happens, like he puts the tariffs on pause, and then stock prices rebound. If you had known he would do that, you could have "bought the dip" and profited hugely when prices went back up.

Well, among Wall Street traders, this buy-the-tariff-dip strategy became known as "the TACO trade", where TACO stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. In other words, he'll talk tough about high tariffs, but will always find some way to back down.


More evidence that we are being governed by a child:

One idea that has been discussed is to transform the [presidential daily briefing] so it mirrors a Fox News broadcast, according to four of the people with direct knowledge of the discussions. Under that concept as it has been discussed, the national intelligence director’s office could hire a Fox News producer to produce it and one of the network’s personalities to present it; Trump, an avid Fox News viewer, could then watch the broadcast PDB whenever he wanted.

A new PDB could include not only graphics and pictures but also maps with animated representations of exploding bombs, similar to a video game, another one of the people with knowledge of the discussions said.

“The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t read,” said another person with direct knowledge of the PDB discussions. “He’s on broadcast all the time.”


Conservatives have retaken power in Poland.


One tool of the creeping surveillance state is the automated license plate reader. Put enough of them in enough places, and you can track who drives where. Like all powers, this can be used for good or ill purposes.

This week 404 Media reported that a Texas police officer used Flock to perform a nationwide search of more than 83,000 ALPR cameras while looking for a woman who had had an abortion. Abortion is almost entirely illegal in Texas but law enforcement reportedly looked at cameras in states such as Washington and Illinois, where abortion is legal.


Jay Kuo's brother Kaiser responds to Secretary of State Rubio's announcement that the US has started revoking the visas of Chinese students.

The soft power cost is immeasurable. For decades, a degree from a U.S. university was the golden ticket, and not just for the prestige and the improved job prospects back home. It was often the start of a lifelong affinity for America, its values, and its people. Some of China’s best-known reformers and tech founders were educated in the U.S. They returned to China with not just skills and credentials, but admiration for an open society that welcomed them. Those days are ending. We are actively teaching the next generation of global talent that America is hostile, capricious, and unwelcoming.


Sam Stein is an American-raised Jewish Israeli citizen who devoted half a year to being a "protective presence" for Palestinians in the West Bank occupied territories.

For six months, I lived alongside those I’d been relentlessly warned would kill me at first opportunity. The truths I learned there must be shared, especially with others raised on the same fears.


The Real News Network's Adam Johnson does a takedown of Jake Tapper and his new book "Original Sin".

So Tapper has found the great scandal of the Biden years, and it is, of course, not one that upsets anyone at the Pentagon, the US Chamber of Commerce, the editorial boards of the New York Times or the Atlantic or AIPAC. The Biden aging story is the perfect pseudo-scandal for corporate media, and thus the perfect Jake Tapper story: vaguely true, but ultimately of peripheral importance, scapegoating a handful of Biden flunkies and, most important of all, it allows Tapper to polish his Speaking Truth to Power brand without speaking truth to anyone in a position of actual power.

Johnson's candidate for the real Biden scandal is supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza.

[I]n over 15 months of co-hosting the influential Sunday news show State of the Union during the Gaza genocide under Biden, Tapper never once platformed a single Palestinian guest, while giving ample platform to a revolving door of Biden officials, Israeli spokespeople, and two softball interviews with Israeli Prime Minister—and fugitive from international justice—Benjamin Netanyahu. 

Consistent with his yawning through the genocide under Biden, Tapper mostly ignores it under Trump and only chimes in to frame the latest Israeli war crime in terms favorable to Israel. Even worse than never bothering to interview a single Palestinian, his Sunday news show, since Israel recommenced its genocide on March 18, hasn’t brought up Gaza as a topic once.


Anthropologist Anand Pandian has traveled the country speaking to people of all backgrounds and opinions.

In my writing, I try to show how everyday structures of isolation – at home and on the road, for the body and the mind – magnify the social and political divides we lament so often. These interlocking walls of everyday life sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it hard to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.

So much turns on the edges between the familiar and the foreign, these lines we’ve come to live with on a daily basis. Can we learn once again to take these edges as spaces of encounter, rather than hard divides between ourselves and the world beyond?

and let's close with an intriguing thought

David Farrier considers the possibility that AI might crack animal languages, and what it might do to human consciousness if we learned how other species communicate.

In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually?

The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal’s umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? “If a lion could talk,” writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, “we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.”

Monday, May 26, 2025

Deep Motives

Trump isn’t trying to make our communities safer from migrant crime, which is not a widespread thing. He is trying to divide us, to make us fear and despise other human beings who live in our communities, and to gain power from that division and fear.

- "The Cruelty Is The Point, But What’s The Goal?"
The Big Picture

This week's featured post is "The Greatness Paradox".

This week everybody was talking about the GOP's budget bill

Last week I wrote about what the "Big Beautiful Bill" contains: tax cuts for rich people, cuts to programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps that help the working poor, and a huge deficit.

Trump's supporters will undoubtedly see hypocrisy my complaints about this bill's deficits when I was fine with Biden's deficits. But there's a big difference: Biden was investing in the future, in infrastructure, and in mitigating the damaging effects of climate change. Trump is just transferring wealth from the bottom of society to the top.

The "Freedom" caucus in the House briefly slowed down the bill's passage, but enough of them fell into line to pass the bill by one vote. The holdouts got a variety of concessions, but the big one is a further cut in Medicaid: the "work requirement" (that adds bureaucratic hurdles to the program and will cause millions of qualified working people to lose their medical coverage) starts in 2027 rather than 2029.


A handful of Republican senators are still pretending to care about the national debt. They will make lots of favorable headlines for themselves and their serious good intentions -- and then quietly cave.


An obscure point about this bill deserves more attention: PAYGO legislation from years ago forces an across-the-board sequestration if deficits go too high. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is projecting that the Big Beautiful Bill might cross that limit and lead to $500 billion in Medicare cuts.

and the ongoing wars

The Ukraine War continues, long after Trump's promise to end it "in 24 hours" expired. As Putin responds to Trump's attempts at peace talks with ever-more-deadly attacks, Trump appears to finally be recognizing that Putin is an enemy to peace. But he frames the situation as Putin-has-changed, not Putin-fooled-me.

“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post, adding, “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!

”Earlier on Sunday the US president told reporters that was he was “very surprised” that his Russian counterpart had intensified the bombardment of Ukrainian cities despite the US president’s efforts to broker a ceasefire.

Pressed by a reporter to say if he was now seriously considering “putting more sanctions on Russia”, Trump replied: “Absolutely. He’s killing a lot of people. What the hell happened to him?”

The sanctions will never happen, because Putin is the alpha in the Putin-Trump relationship.


Israel's genocide in Gaza continues and even escalates. I used to hesitate to use that word, but I don't see how else to characterize the situation. This week, Israel's former prime minister Ehud Olmert wrote an op-ed in a leading Israeli newspaper:

“What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination: indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal, and criminal killing of civilians,” he said.

“We are doing this not because of an accidental loss of control in a particular sector, not because of a disproportionate outburst of fighters in some unit — but as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, viciously, maliciously, recklessly,” Olmert’s op-ed continued. “Yes, we are committing war crimes.”


I continue to denounce any attempt by Americans of any opinion to bring the Gaza War here. The murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. Wednesday helps no one. And there is even less justification for harassing American Jews for the actions of the Netanyahu government.

Similarly, demonstrating or writing in favor of Palestine is no reason to deport foreign students.

In America, we can and should argue about issues of all kinds. We have the right to speak out and peacefully demonstrate to make our opinions known. But leave the violence over there. Our goal should be to stop the violence there, not bring it here.

and Joe Biden

Last week we heard that Joe Biden has an advanced form of prostate cancer. I cannot remember bad news about a former president being met with less compassion. Don Jr. tweeted:

What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up???

When he took flack for that stone-hearted comment, he struck back:

I sometimes forget that part of the mental disorder of leftism is an inability to understand sarcasm.

No, we get the sarcasm. What we can't understand is posting a sarcastic response to another human being's death sentence.

Laura Loomer skipped any attempt at humor and went straight for venom.

To all of you praying for Joe Biden, can you pray for the people he killed with his open border policies instead? “Ohhhh boo hoo he’s such a good guy booo hooo he’s such a fighter.” No he’s not. And no, he’s not. He is going down in history as the worst US President EVER.

No, Laura, I think your guy has that title pretty well wrapped up.

For the mainstream media, this was another opportunity to raise the dementia-cover-up theory. I find it striking how much of this story revolves around Biden's trouble walking, and has nothing to do with an inability to think.

In a statement to Axios, an anonymous Biden aide said: "Yes, there were physical changes as he got older, but evidence of aging is not evidence of mental incapacity."

The spokesperson added: "We are still waiting for someone, anyone, to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline.

"In fact, the evidence points to the opposite - he was a very effective president."

I don't know how much he did himself and how much he delegated, but everything that happened during the Biden administration was consistent with the man he has always been. The US was well-governed during his four years, and he did an excellent job of cleaning up the mess Trump left behind after his first term.

And whether you liked his politics or not, his career is done now and he's likely to die soon. It costs you nothing to treat him like a human being.

and you also might be interested in ...

Bruce Springsteen tells it like it is:


The measles outbreak in Texas seems to be waning, but the disease is still spreading in New Mexico and Kansas. Officials worry about the outbreak spreading further as more people travel in the summer. Already, 2025 has the second-most cases of any year in this century.


Just in case you thought it couldn't get worse: The EPA wants to completely eliminate greenhouse gas limits on power plants.


MSNBC host Jen Psaki used to answer questions as Biden's press secretary. One of the more charming features of her current show is to take questions from current White House press conferences and answer them honestly, something current press secretary Karoline Leavitt will never do.


I always thought Kristi Noem was an opportunist. But now we find out she's also an idiot.


It's been five years since a Minneapolis policeman murdered George Floyd, igniting protests around the country. NPR's Michel Martin spoke to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump. Activists M Adams and Miski Noor argue that the resulting movement to defund the police accomplished more than you might think. On the other hand, the NYT reports that police killings have risen every year since Floyd's murder.


David Roberts:

If you're talking about jobs that could relatively easily be replaced with AI, I would suggest, at the top of the list: [mainstream media] political reporter. How trivially easy would it be to program an AI to crank out "Dems in disarray" pieces from now to eternity?


Ruben Bolling does his best Dr. Seuss imitation:

and let's close with something challenging

The Sony World Photography Awards open a new competition on Sunday. Just for reference, here's last year's winner.

Monday, May 19, 2025

Still Sanewashing

It’s hard to avoid the sense that what we’re seeing on tariffs is another version of the sanewashing that Trump has benefited from ever since he entered politics. People just keep wanting to believe that he’s making sense, that he isn’t as ignorant and irresponsible as he seems. But he is.

- Paul Krugman "The Trade War Isn't Over"

This week's featured posts are "What's up with the Supreme Court?" and "The Big Beautiful Bill".

This week everybody was talking about the FY 2026 budget

Trump's "big beautiful bill" squeaked through the House Budget Committee yesterday. Details about what the bill is intended to accomplish are in one featured post.

and Trump's retreat on tariffs

It's been about six weeks since Trump announced "Liberation Day", when drastically increased tariffs freed Americans from the tyranny of full shelves and cheap products made overseas. Stephen Miller called it "the most significant action on global trade policy that has taken place in our lifetimes".

Then it all started to unravel. (Timeline from The Guardian.) The bizarrely determined individual "reciprocal tariffs" imposed on imports from each country came and went in less than a day, even though deals had been announced only with the UK -- and that one was still tentative. A week ago, Trump announced that the 145% tariffs on Chinese goods would go down to 30% for 90 days.

So here we are. The Treasury secretary is still threatening that the "reciprocal" tariff levels will be back if countries don't negotiate "in good faith", as if the US has been acting in good faith. But the markets have returned to their pre-liberation levels, as investors seem to be pretending the last six weeks were just a bad dream. Maybe Trump has learned his lesson now, as Senator Collins claimed after voting to acquit in his first impeachment.

Paul Krugman would like to differ.

If you get your picture of what’s happening from “news analyses” rather than experts who actually do the math, you might well think that the Trump trade war is basically over, that we’re back to more or less normal policy.

The reality is that we’ve gone from a completely insane tariff rate on imports from China to a rate that’s merely crazy. And China accounts for only a fraction of our imports. Tariffs on everyone else are still at 10 percent, a level we haven’t seen in generations. And there are still other shoes to drop: Trump has, for example, been promising tariffs on pharmaceuticals.

The trade war is still very much on. ... In other words, not much has changed since last week. We may not be looking at the complete economic meltdown that seemed quite possible (and is still a possibility), but we’re still looking at much higher inflation and an economic slowdown at best — i.e., stagflation.

and bribery

Other than going to Vatican City to sleep at Pope Francis' funeral, the first overseas trip of Trump's second administration was the tour of the oil-rich kingdoms of the Persian Gulf he completed this week. He took with him friendly tech-company CEOs "including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Amazon’s Andy Jassy, Palantir’s Alex Karp and two dozen others".

While it's not unusual for presidents to promote US business interests overseas, the trip's biggest headlines concerned the benefits to Trump himself, including Qatar's gift of a $400 million "palace in the sky" intended to replace Air Force One, which Trump has long considered shabby and whose replacement is behind schedule. (Technically, the plane is a gift to the US government, but Trump's plan is for it to go to his presidential library foundation -- which he will control -- after he leaves office.)

A much more direct enrichment of Trump came from an Abu Dhabi firm that invested $2 billion in his crypto-coin scheme. Some of the investments in US corporations involved changes in government policy, like allowing the United Arab Emirates to buy quantities of top Nvidia chips that would have been forbidden under Biden administration policies, trusting the UAE not to pass such advanced tech on to a rival superpower like China.

Richard Painter, previously a government ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, commented:

[T]he impression is given that the position of the United States can be swayed and even bought.

and the Guardian reported:

Past administrations would have run from the perceived conflicts of interest being welcomed by Trump. ... “The status quo has been saying no, because it’s an actual and apparent conflict of interest, and it could jeopardize our domestic and foreign policies,” said [Scott] Amey [of the non-profit Project On Government Oversight]. ”It certainly doesn’t pass the sniff test for a lot of Americans.”

The lavish gifts and other investments come as Trump is reshaping America’s policy in the Middle East, skipping Israel and turning toward the Gulf states in a flurry of deal-making that could benefit both sides handsomely.

and the Palm Springs bombing

An IVF clinic in California was bombed Saturday morning, in an apparent terrorist attack. My first thought was that this was the work of people who believe in ensoulment at conception, upset that IVF clinics destroy fertilized embryos after they are no longer needed.

But no, it looks like the perpetrator, who also appears to have been the sole fatality, is an antinatalist. I had no idea what that was until NPR explained it: An antinatalist believes it is wrong to have children.

and you also might be interested in ...

We can expect a robust tourist trade this summer.


It's got to be hard for satirical sites like The Onion to compete with real headlines like this one: "Trump's DHS considers reality show where immigrants compete for citizenship, producer says".


DOGE is still around, and still exceeding any possible authority it might have. It's been trying to take over agencies that serve Congress, like the Library of Congress and the General Accounting Office.



Oklahoma's new social studies curriculum will encourage students to believe Trump's conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.


Some good news on climate change from the UK-based Carbon Brief website, which looks like a good source for in-depth information about the climate.



and let's close with something commercial

I'm not sure how Facebook figured out my sense of humor, but lately I've been deluged with ads for history-related t-shirts.

Monday, May 12, 2025

True Greatness

America is the greatest democracy in the world.

- Rümeysa Öztürk,
arriving back in Massachusetts after her court-ordered release

This week's featured post is "As we approach our crisis of democracy, we’re in better shape than I expected".

This week everybody was talking about the new Pope

Thursday, the College of Cardinals elected the next pope: Leo XIV.

In my previous weekly summary (April 21) I said:

Undoubtedly there will now be a battle for the soul of Catholicism. Will the church continue on the path Francis started down, or will it return to its traditional role as an ally of authoritarians and the privileged classes?

Leo XIV may surprise me, but at first glance it looks like the Francis faction won. The new pope seems more interested in the Sermon on the Mount than in fighting the culture wars.

I think the name he chose is significant: in 1891, Leo XIII wrote the ground-breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), which has been the foundation of Catholic social justice thinking ever since. The main idea of Rerum Novarum is for the church to take seriously the plight of working people under capitalism. It represented a realization that without a clearly worker-sympathetic position, the church might lose out to some form of Marxism.

By choosing to be another Leo, this pope gestures towards both a sympathy with the lower classes and a willingness to modernize Catholic doctrine.

Much is being made of Leo's American roots He grew up in Chicago, and his time the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago overlapped my years at the University of Chicago a few blocks away. We probably walked past each other on the sidewalk. Chicago is extremely proud to claim Leo, as the following cartoon illustrates.

To me, the greatest significance of an American pope is that he'll be much harder for conservative American Catholics to ignore. (I'm looking at you, J. D. Vance and Sam Alito.)

and Trump's legal losses

Yesterday, a federal judge in Vermont ordered Rümeysa Öztürk released on bail without travel restrictions. She's the Tufts student who was kidnapped off the street in Somerville, Massachusetts by masked DHS agents and taken to a detention center in Louisiana. The administration obeyed the order, and Özturk is back in Massachusetts walking around free.

Chris Geidner of the Law Dork blog:

[Judge William Sessions concluded] that she has raised "a very substantial First Amendment claim" in her underlying habeas challenge, in addition to a “substantial claim” that the Trump administration violated her due process rights regarding her detention as well.

Prior to being arrested, Öztürk had been a Tufts Ph.D. student legally in the country on a student visa. What appears to have drawn the administration's ire was an op-ed Öztürk wrote (with co-authors) in Tufts Daily urging the Tufts administration to "acknowledge the Palestinian genocide". The judge wrote:

"There is absolutely no evidence that she has engaged in violence or advocated violence.” Additionally, he noted, “I do not find that any of the contacts that she has in the community create any danger or risk of flight."

If you read the First Amendment, you will notice that it says nothing about citizenship. Freedom of speech is a human right, not a privilege of citizenship.

In a similar case, a federal appeals court denied the administration's motion to stay the release of Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi. Mahdawi was a green-card holder who was arrested in Vermont when he appeared for an interview related to his application for citizenship. He similarly has no record of violence or criminality, and has only advocated for Gaza.


Several federal judges have ruled against the administration on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act; this is the basis for Trump to send people to prison in El Salvador. (See the same Law Dork link.) The Act allows the president to deport foreign nationals during time of war, predatory incursion, or invasion. Judges in a variety of jurisdictions have been finding that the current situation does not fit into any of those categories. Trump can call mass migration of individuals an "invasion", but that does not match the way such a term was used in 1798 when the AEA was passed.


Yet another judge issued a restraining order against Trump's mass firings of federal workers. (Same Law Dork link.)

“It is the prerogative of presidents to pursue new policy priorities and to imprint their stamp on the federal government. But to make large-scale overhauls of federal agencies, any president must enlist the help of his co-equal branch and partner, the Congress,” U.S. District Judge Susan Illston wrote in the decision. “Federal courts should not micromanage the vast federal workforce, but courts must sometimes act to preserve the proper checks and balances between the three branches of government.“

... “Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim that the President’s Executive Order 14210 is ultra vires” — or beyond the president’s legal authority, in other words illegal — “as the President has neither constitutional nor, at this time, statutory authority to reorganize the executive branch,” [Judge Susan] Illston wrote.


One Trump victory: the purge of transfolk from the armed services can continue.


In general, I think the media is doing a bad job of explaining why the Trump administration is snatching people off the street, deporting American children, and so on: Trump was elected because he sold voters a dark fantasy about Biden's America: The nation had been overrun by millions of immigrant criminals whose gangs had taken over our cities. The local police knew who they were, but couldn't do anything because Biden protected the criminals. But Trump would be able to deport them all quickly. Millions of them.

So now he's elected and has a real world to deal with: There aren't millions of immigrant criminals and there is no migrant crime wave. If he just deports people for legitimate reasons, he can't achieve the numbers his supporters expect.

That's why he has to deport not just the relatively small number of immigrant criminals, but also men with tattoos, students who expressed anti-Israel opinions, and so on. And he's still not making the numbers his followers expect.

and the FY 2026 budget

Nothing sums up the problems Republicans face in putting together a budget than this: Senator Josh Hawley isn't down with cutting Medicaid.

As for Missouri, it is one of 40 Medicaid expansion states — because our voters wanted it that way. In 2020, the same year Mr. Trump carried the Missouri popular vote by a decisive margin, voters mandated that the state expand Medicaid coverage to working-class individuals unable to afford health care elsewhere. Voters went so far as to inscribe that expansion in our state constitution. Now some 21 percent of Missourians benefit from Medicaid or CHIP, the companion insurance program for lower-income children. And many of our rural hospitals and health providers depend on the funding from these programs to keep their doors open.

All of which means this: If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will replicate in states across the country.

Meanwhile, the House leadership's budget calls for more than $800 billion in Medicaid cuts.

A preliminary estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the proposals would reduce the number of people with health care by 8.6 million over the decade.

They're clever about it: They aren't cutting "benefits", they're just slashing the federal reimbursement to states. Then most red states will scrap the Medicaid expansion associated with Obama's Affordable Care Act, providing Congress with deniability: We didn't do it, the states did it.

The end result, though, is exactly what Hawley says: People (particularly people working for barely more than minimum wage) will lose their health insurance, and rural hospitals will close.

Cuts like this (and to food stamps, which also affects the working poor) are necessary so that billionaires can pay lower taxes. And even then, a huge deficit will remain. I don't know how Republicans will be able to sell this to their base. And if they can't, their slim majorities in Congress won't hold together well enough to push it through.

This is another example of the MAGA fantasy world running into reality. In the fantasy world, government is full of waste and fraud that a smart guy like Elon can point out and eliminate. That way, spending can be slashed without affecting ordinary Americans.

but I want to talk about optimism

That's the subject of this week's featured post. My view wouldn't be optimistic in any other context: I still think we're facing a crisis of democracy. But we're facing it in better shape than I thought we'd be in.

and you also might be interested in ...

Brought to you by the party that supports family values:


Vox' Zack Beauchamp warns:

Israel’s war in Gaza, which has long been a moral atrocity, is on the brink of becoming unimaginably worse.

He quotes Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich;

“Within a few months, we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be totally destroyed,” Smotrich said. “In another six months, Hamas won’t exist as a functioning entity.”

He told the listening audience that the population of Gaza, some 2.3 million Palestinians, would be “concentrated” in a narrow strip of land between the Egyptian border and the so-called Morag Corridor, which runs the width of Gaza between Khan Younis and the border city of Rafah.

“They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”

Beauchamp notes that this is "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing".


Mass shootings are down. No idea why.


Trump has stopped just about all refugee resettlement in the US. But he has finally found a group of refugees he likes: White South Africans.

The Trump administration is bringing a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees next week in what it says is the start of a larger relocation effort for a minority group who are being persecuted by their Black-led government because of their race.

But are they persecuted? Not in any way that makes them stand out, and maybe not at all. But they're White, so they go to the front of the line.


This week in corruption:

In what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government, the Trump administration is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar -- a gift that is to be available for use by President Donald Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation, sources familiar with the proposed arrangement told ABC News.

Nothing to see here, just a foreign government giving an extremely valuable gift not to the United States, but for the benefit of one person, who happens to make many decisions the government of Qatar might want to influence.

The Guardian reviews the rules on presidential gifts, which are legally regarded as gifts to the American people. Previous presidents have transferred gifts -- none of them nearly this large -- to their presidential libraries for public display. But in Trump's case this appears to be a dodge, as the plane will remain available for Trump's personal use after ownership transfers. Judd Legum:

Can we please stop staying that, after Trump leaves office, the $400 million plane from Qatar will be given to the "Trump Presidential Library" Libraries do not fly on planes. The plane will be given to Trump.

The jet is not the only Qatari bribe. There's also his partnership with Qatar's sovereign wealth fund in developing a new Trump International Golf Club in Qatar.


The measles outbreak continues to spread, and even though it started before RFK Jr. took over as HHS Secretary, he's coming to own it. The costs of his anti-vaccine crusade are becoming obvious.


A Republican attempt to steal a state supreme court seat in North Carolina was finally thwarted this week, a mere six months after an election that the Democratic candidate won.

[Incumbent Justice Allison] Riggs won the election in November by just 734 votes, but [Republican challenger Jefferson] Griffin mounted a massive legal challenge to overturn the election results and disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters. At the heart of Griffin’s lawsuit was a challenge to 65,000 lawfully cast ballots that he believed should be tossed out, because of errors made by the North Carolina elections board. The board counted some 60,000 ballots cast by voters with allegedly incomplete registration. ... In fact, the litigation raised no significant evidence whatsoever that any illegitimate votes were cast.

A federal judge ruled in Riggs favor last Monday.

“This case concerns whether the federal constitution permits a state to alter the rules of an election after the fact and apply those changes retroactively to only a select group of voters, and in so doing treat those voters differently than other similarly situated individuals. This case is also about whether a state may redefine its class of eligible voters but offer no process to those who may have been misclassified as ineligible,” Myers wrote in his opinion. “To this court, the answer to each of those questions is ‘no.’”

Griffin decided not to appeal, so the case is finally over.


The US and China have agreed to reduce the massive tariffs each have imposed on the other, from 145% and 125% to 30% and 10%. The reduction is temporary: 90 days. We'll see if that's enough to cause trade to start flowing again. 30% is still a pretty hefty price increase.

and let's close with something distracting

If you're on BlueSky and looking for something to brighten up your otherwise depressing news feed, I recommend following Daily Bunnies. You'll get a reliable stream of cute rabbit pictures. I guarantee that this sleepy bunny is not worrying about whatever is bothering you.

Monday, April 21, 2025

3 R's

NO SIFT FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS. THE NEXT NEW ARTICLES WILL APPEAR ON MAY 12.

Resist. Rebel. Rebuild.

- Daredevil, from the season finale of Daredevil: Born Again

There's no featured post this week.

This week everybody was talking about Pope Francis

Pope Francis died this morning.

I have never been Catholic, so I view all papacies from the outside. But Francis was the first pope of my adult lifetime that I didn't instinctively think of as a political and social opponent. Previous popes, from my point of view, allowed Catholicism to be dominated by culture-war issues: anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-birth-control, pro-patriarchy, and so on.

People closer to the Catholic Church can comment on whatever doctrines he may have changed, which were largely invisible to non-Catholics. The church he leaves behind is still a patriarchal institution that teaches many ideas I view as wrong-headed. But to me, the main thing he did was shift the emphasis: from policing people's bedrooms to standing up for the downtrodden and those on the fringes of society.

Undoubtedly there will now be a battle for the soul of Catholicism. Will the church continue on the path Francis started down, or will it return to its traditional role as an ally of authoritarians and the privileged classes?


Two of the last things Francis did were to celebrate Easter and meet with J. D. Vance. Call me cynical, but I expect Vance to lie extensively about his papal audience. It is very easy for unscrupulous people to put words into the mouths of the dead.

and Pete Hegseth

Back when the Signal fiasco first surfaced a few weeks ago, many people speculated that this didn't come out of the blue. Nobody on the chat treated the situation as weird, suggesting they'd done it before.

Well, now we have another example:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.

The first Signal chat group was set up by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, but this one was set up by Hegseth himself.

This administration is filled with unqualified people like Hegseth who are not serious about national security. Showing off for friends, family, and coworkers is more important to them than keeping Americans safe.

Remind me: Why did anybody ever think Pete Hegseth belonged in this job?

and Harvard

Who expected Harvard to start leading the academic community's resistance to the Trump autocracy? How did we get here?

On April 11, representatives of the GSA, HHS, and Education Department sent a list of demands to the president of Harvard University and the leading member of the Harvard Corporation. The demands essentially would put in the university in receivership, with "an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith" empowered to audit "the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity". Departments that failed this audit would required to hire new faculty and admit new students until "viewpoint diversity" was achieved.

In other words: Acceding to the government's demands would authorize MAGA thought police to roam the campus, searching out dissent and bringing in Trump acolytes to "balance" campus viewpoints. This proposal directly contradicts the government's demand to eliminate DEI programs in favor of "merit-based" hiring and admissions. "Merit" only matters if you're Black, not if you're pro-Trump.

The letter warns that the government's "investment" in Harvard (i.e., research grants that Harvard wins in competition with other universities) "is not an entitlement", and depends on Harvard taking steps to prevent "ideological capture" by any ideology other than that of the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, Harvard could contemplate the sad example of Columbia, which knuckled under to Trump's demands and appears to have gotten nothing in return. Additionally, the law firms that have made deals with Trump are finding the terms changing on them. Once you start paying an extortionist, he's bound to demand more.

So all in all Harvard felt it had little choice in its response:

The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government. Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.

In a letter to the larger Harvard community, President Garber went further:

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

Various Trump officials then claimed the threatening letter had been sent by mistake. But that didn't square with the fact that the Trump administration then started carrying out its threats: $2.2 billion in grants are frozen, though they have been slow to announce which ones. The optics of that are going to be really bad for Trump. Cancellations we already know of stop research on tuberculosis and ALS. If you are counting on research like that to produce a miracle cure for yourself or your family, you're not going to be very happy.

Trump has also threatened Harvard's tax-exempt status, a move that he probably can't carry out within the law.

I know no one is shamed by hypocrisy any more, but The Bulwark's Tim Miller and Sarah Longwell went back to look at the outrage of people like J. D. Vance and Ted Cruz a few years ago when the Right (falsely) thought the Obama administration had instructed the IRS to target Tea Party groups. (In the wake of Citizens United, the IRS did heighten their scrutiny of new tax-exempt groups, which included a bumper crop of new Tea Party groups. But none inappropriately lost their tax-exempt status and no link to the White House was ever found.) Here's what Vance was saying:

This is about whether we have functional constitutional government in this country. If the IRS can go after you because of what you think or what you believe or what you do, we no longer live in a free country.


The biggest sham of this whole attack on American universities is that it has something to do with antisemitism. Trump cares nothing about antisemitism.

In Charlottesville, Trump was careful to differentiate between actual Nazis and the "very fine people" who marched next to the Nazis. But there is no similar consideration for any "fine people" who participated in campus protests in honest sympathy with the plight of Palestinians, or out of horror at the genocide in Gaza. To Trump, the presence of antisemites in the demonstrations tars everyone involved. The double standard here has an obvious interpretation: Antisemitism is just a club to use against the universities, which he sees as his enemies anyway.

and the courts

The Trump administration had another bad week in court. First, there's the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who came to the US illegally in 2011 and was granted withholding-of-removal status by an immigration court in 2019. The Trump administration ignored his legal status and deported him to the CECOT prison in El Salvador on March 15, in what an administration lawyer has since described as "an administrative error". On April 10, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the administration to "facilitate" Garcia's return to the US, where he might then face renewed attempts to deport him within the law. The Court sent the case back to district court Judge Paula Xinis to work out the details of Garcia's return.

The administration has defied that order while claiming that it is not defying it, by putting a ridiculous spin on "facilitate" that does not require it to do anything at all. Trump had an oval office meeting with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, where they each professed their powerlessness to do anything for Garcia, essentially making a joke out of the Court's unanimous order.

Xinis has ordered a two-week inquiry into the case that will include sworn depositions from administration officials, creating a record that could lead to contempt proceedings. Trump's lawyers tried to put a stay on her order, which an appeals court unanimously rejected on Thursday. More than just the order itself, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson's opinion rejected Trump's arguments in their entirety.

The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.

The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.

As Jay Kuo notes, Wilkinson is a Reagan appointee whose conservative credentials are impeccable. This isn't about left-and-right, it's about right-and-wrong.

Trump administration rhetoric continues to try to make this case about illegal immigration and its mythical immigrant crime wave. As J. D. Vance tweeted

The entire American media and left wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien)

The problem with that argument should be obvious: Vance assumes what so far has not been proved. If Garcia actually is a gang member who poses a threat to public safety, then by all means deport him. No one argues against that. But so far all we know is that the Trump administration SAYS he's a gang member who threatens public safety. They could say that about me or you or anybody. If Trump can send someone to his concentration camp in El Salvador just by accusing him of something, then we really are in a totalitarian state.

After all, Trump himself has been very credibly accused of crimes, and even convicted of some. I've seen a lot more evidence of Trump's crimes than of Garcia's.


The Supreme Court also ordered 7-2 that further deportations to CECOT be stopped.

In a brief order released at about 1 a.m. Saturday, the court directed the administration to temporarily halt any plan to deport a group of Venezuelan nationals who have been detained in northern Texas and have been designated as “alien enemies.”

Again, Trump wants to make this about immigrant crime, assuming without proof that all the people he wants to deport are actually dangerous. So far, though, everything we know suggests the administration isn't being particularly rigorous about establishing guilt.

The essential difference between a legitimate prison and a concentration camp is legal process. If you can be sent there on somebody's unsupported say-so, you'll stay there until somebody else says you can leave, and while you're there you have no way to protest your treatment, then you're in a concentration camp.


Wednesday, Judge James Boasberg

found probable cause Wednesday to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for willfully disobeying his order to immediately halt deportations under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act and turn around any airborne planes. ... “The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”


Another judge has ordered the administration to stop its firing of the 1500 employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Like Judge Xinis in the Garcia case, Judge Berman is demanding testimony under oath from Trump officials who seem to have ignored her previous order.


The gist of all these rulings is that time is running out on the administration's claims that it isn't disobeying court orders, based on obviously ridiculous interpretations of those orders. Before long they're going to have to either obey the orders or openly defy them.

and you also might be interested in ...


If you need to hear an optimistic voice, read this piece at The Contrarian by Norm Eisen.

I'm pretty much where Eisen is. When Trump took office, I anticipated a lot of the ways he would assault American democracy. The real question in my mind was how clever he would be and whether anyone would oppose him.

Well, three months into his second administration, we can see that he's not being very clever at all, and opposition is forming, both in the courts and in public opinion. The Economist shows Trump's net approval rating crossing below his sorry showing from the same point in his first term.

Congress will be slower to come around, but I think that will happen, at least partially. It will start with Republicans' inability to unite around an FY 2026 budget proposal. What they have so far

  • cuts rich people's taxes
  • cuts programs that many small-town and rural Trump voters rely on, like Medicaid and food stamps.
  • still has a huge deficit.

A lot of Trump voters still believe that the spending cuts will all be "waste and fraud" cuts that target illegal aliens and maybe some other dark-skinned people they don't like. (In MAGAland, spending on non-whites is inherently wasteful.) They're going to see that it really means kicking Mom out of the nursing home, closing their small-town hospital, and skipping a few meals of their own.

Trump could even sell those White working-class "sacrifices" as necessary to control an out-of-control government debt. But calling for sacrifice and not controlling the debt is going to be a hard case to make.


Alaska's Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said out loud what a lot of people have been whispering: Republicans in Congress are afraid to cross Trump. "I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real. And that’s not right."


Now there's data to back up what a lot of people intuited some while ago: Foreign tourists are viewing the US as a risky and unpleasant place to visit.


A transwoman runner in Virginia had to leave the girls cross-country team when the Virginia HIgh School League changed its rules to get into harmony with the Trump administration. So she did what a lot of anti-trans rhetoric suggests she should do: join the boys team.

So now somebody who presents as female is on the male team, presumably raising a new set of locker room issues. Is this better?


RFK Jr. says he will identify the "environmental toxin" that causes autism. People who have spent their lives studying autism don't believe such a thing exists, but cranks like Kennedy always know better.


Remember when Candidate Trump said that ending the Ukraine War was easy, and that he could do it in 24 hours? Well, now that he's president, Trump is complaining that the two countries aren't cooperating, so he's thinking about taking his Peace and going home.


Trump pledged to lower grocery prices on Day 1, and has even claimed success by making up completely false statistics about the price of eggs. Actually, egg prices hit a record in March.

Average grocery prices were about 2.41% higher in March 2025 than they were in March 2024, Consumer Price Index data shows. This was the highest year-over-year grocery inflation rate since August 2023. And average March 2025 grocery prices were up about 0.49% from February 2025. That was the highest month-to-month grocery inflation rate since October 2022.

And that's before we see the effect of tariffs on imported foods like coffee and fruit, which should kick in soon.


More evidence that DOGE is a grift: Musk has

spared the jobs of US Department of Transportation employees who provide support services for spacecraft launches by Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Starlink ... While the administration and Doge have targeted hundreds of thousands of federal employees, critics say the decision shows Musk is willing to allow federal workers to remain employed if their work benefits him.


DOGE cuts are literally killing people.


The myth behind DOGE is that Musk commands a small army of smart nerds who can revolutionize how government works. But wouldn't you know it? The Pentagon had already thought of that idea back in 2015 and has assembled its own nerds in the Defense Digital Service. Unlike Musk's minions, these folks have actually done a few things that worked.

Now they're all resigning.

One former senior Pentagon official, who asked not to be named because of possible retaliation, described DOGE’s wider incursion into the Defense Department as damaging and unproductive: “They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re doing is smashing everything,” the former official said. At the DDS, “The best way to put it, I think, is either we die quickly or we die slowly,” Hay said.


In this era where so many institutions are yielding to autocracy without a fight, I've been interested to see what Marvel Studios and their Disney overlords have done with the new Daredevil series Daredevil: Born Again.

No one ever refers to Trump during the series, and if the words Republican or Democrat were spoken, I don't remember them. But it's hard to imagine a major studio making a stronger anti-MAGA statement.

The story arc of the season is how Daredevil's nemesis, Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. the Kingpin, escapes accountability for his criminal past and gets elected Mayor of New York on a very MAGA-ish platform: New York is in crisis and only a crusading outsider like Fisk can fix it. Once in power, he uses a combination of legal and illegal power to co-opt the city's other power centers. He recruits NYPD's most brutal officers into an elite "anti-crime" squad that operates outside normal rules, then artificially creates a crisis that justifies a near-complete authoritarian takeover. The "resist, rebel, rebuild" quote at the top of the page is from Daredevil's rallying message to his allies at the end of the season, presumably setting up the fall of Fisk in season 2.

and let's close with something embarrassing

I explained last week how my town of Bedford often finds itself in the shade of its neighbors Lexington and Concord. So I felt a little schadenfreude when this particular celebration in Lexington didn't go exactly as planned.