I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way. If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.
- SDNY Assistant US Attorney Hagan Scotten
writing to resign after a DoJ order
to dismiss charges against NY Mayor Eric Adams
This week's featured post is "Can Ethical People Work in the Trump Administration?"
This week everybody was talking about the DoJ resignations
The resignation of seven federal prosecutors is covered in the featured post.
and Elon Musk's growing power
The Guardian summed up the state of things on Sunday:
Musk and his allies in the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), the unofficial committee acting as the operations arm of his cost-cutting efforts, have targeted a range of major government departments. They have moved to close the United States Agency for International Development, slashed the Department of Education and taken over the General Services Administration that controls federal IT structures. Doge staffers have also gained access to the treasury department, as well as set their sights on the Department of Defense, energy department, Environmental Protection Agency and at least a dozen others.
It's worth pointing out that Musk's authority is entirely delegated from President Trump, and the Constitution does not give Trump the power to do many of these things without Congress. But Congress has played no role in any of DOGE's actions. It never established DOGE as a government department, and Musk's appointment has never been confirmed by the Senate. Agencies like USAID and the Department of Education were set up and funded by Congress, so the President (and hence Musk) has no legal authority to close them or block the money Congress has appropriated to fund them.
The Guardian goes on to point out how Musk is benefiting personally from much of what he does.
As companies seek to benefit from Doge’s reshaping of the government, Musk also has extensive contracts worth billions of dollars through his own companies like SpaceX that are potentially set to expand under the new administration. ... Musk’s influence in the White House also puts in peril the numerous federal investigations against his companies for a range of alleged wrongdoings that includes violating federal labor and securities laws. Trump has already dissolved one watchdog agency investigating Tesla. Government accountability groups have warned that Musk’s myriad of potential ethical conflicts and a lack of transparency around his actions in government carry the risk that he will use his power for political corruption.
“You don’t need to be any kind of ethics expert to to appreciate the massive problem there is with a billionaire who helped fund the president’s campaign and has government contracts of his own being given the power to root around in agency systems that impact how and when government contractors are paid,” said Donald Sherman, executive director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew), a watchdog organization.
To justify himself, Trump has quoted the Emperor Napoleon: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” ("Saving the country" is in the eye of the beholder. So had he succeeded, would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks might have used the same justification.)
The slipshod nature of DOGE's actions was underlined this week when it came out that DOGE had fired more than 300 employees of the Nuclear National Security Administration, the people who watch over our nuclear weapons stockpile.
Some of the fired employees included NNSA staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons. It also included employees at NNSA headquarters who write requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime to understand what we do and the importance of our work to the nation’s national security.”
When people who do understand what NNSA does got involved, the government tried to rescind the firings. However, the fired employees had lost access to their work email accounts, so no one immediately knew how to contact them.
Keep this in mind when you hear pronouncements about "waste" from Musk or other DOGE people: Everything looks like waste when you don't understand it.
Another blow to the "genius" image of Musk and his minions came when it turned out that the Doge.gov web site had security problems.
Did you hear about the $50 million in condoms USAID sent to Hamas? Or the 150-year-olds collecting Social Security? Or that USAID is a criminal organization, in league with money-laundering Lutheran charities?
Complete bullshit, to use a technical term coined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Nothing Musk says should be believed until he provides evidence.
and the law
Proclamations of Napoleon have no legal weight in the United States, so many of Musk's actions are being challenged in court. So far the Trump administration is losing most of those cases.
However, last year Trump also lost on his presidential-immunity argument all the way up the line until the partisan Republican Supreme Court got the case. Lower courts are obliged to follow previous precedents (though occasionally a judge goes rogue). But the Supreme Court is free to make up law as it sees fit, as it did in the immunity case.
Same thing here. A simple reading of the Constitution (in the birthright citizenship cases) or the law (in the freezing-federal-funding cases) forces a judge to rule against Trump. But the basic argument Trump is making across the board is that any law limiting his power is unconstitutional. (For example: The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 says that a president has to spend money as Congress has appropriated it. Previous Supreme Courts have upheld the Act's constitutionality, and those precedents tie the hands of lower-court judges.)
That is an absurd argument ungrounded in the history of American law. But so was sweeping presidential immunity. During the Biden administration, the Court's six conservative justices frequently limited the executive branch's ability to act without authorization by Congress. But Biden was a Democrat, and in the Roberts Era the law changes depending on which party has power.
But will it change this far? We may be about to find out. Here's the background: The US Office of the Special Counsel is an independent agency established by Congress.
OSC's primary mission is to safeguard the merit system by protecting federal employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices (PPPs), especially reprisal for whistleblowing.
The limits state that the Special Counsel is nominated by the president, subject to Senate confirmation, for a five-year term and can only be removed by the president “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
This set-up makes perfect sense, because OSC can't do its job if the same authority that wants to go after whistleblowers, i.e., the President, can also fire the Special Counsel if he gets in the way. However, Trump did fire Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger without cause. Dellinger went to court, and was granted a temporary restraining order preventing Trump from firing him. An appeals court refused the administration's appeal 2-1, but the dissenting judge (a Trump appointee) objected that "Congress cannot constitutionally restrict the President’s power to remove the Special Counsel."
Yesterday, the administration took its appeal to the Supreme Court, hoping that its Trump-cannot-be-bound (even though Biden could) argument prevails there. If it does, I suspect that few of the current lower-court rulings against Trump will stand.
and Ukraine
Tomorrow, a US delegation headed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with Russian counterparts to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. Notice who will not be there: a Ukrainian delegation or anyone representing our European allies.
Prior to these talks, the Trump administration already seems to have conceded much of what Russia wants. At a NATO meeting in Brussels last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Ukraine will not restore its pre-invasion borders, and he distanced the US from any guarantees for Ukraine's future. He called Ukraine's desire for NATO membership "unrealistic".
In sweeping remarks to NATO allies eager to hear how much support Washington intends to provide to the Ukrainian government, Hegseth indicated that Trump is determined to get Europe to assume most of the financial and military responsibilities for Ukraine’s defense, including a possible peacekeeping force that would not include U.S. troops.
Worse, any European troops deployed to Ukraine would not be covered by the NATO mutual-defense agreement. If Putin would decide to attack them, they would be on their own.
Afterwards, Hegseth was asked a fairly obvious question:
You have focused on what Ukraine is giving up. What concessions will Putin be asked to make?
The true answer here would be "none", but instead Hegseth went off on a tangent about how Putin responds to "strength", so he invaded Crimea during the Obama administration and attacked the rest of Ukraine during the Biden administration, but did not launch any new invasions during Trump's first term.
On the one hand it's interesting that Hegseth didn't answer the question asked. But it's also worth trying to figure out what question he answered instead. I postulate this one: "Should we be worried that Trump is in Putin's pocket?"
BTW, I think his answer to that question is misleading as well. During the first Trump administration, Putin knew that time was on his side, because Trump was dismantling NATO from within. After Biden started putting NATO back together, Putin attacked because he saw his window for action shrinking.
Plus, it is absurd to characterize an American president willing to concede virtually everything Putin wants before negotiations even begin as "strong".
and Gaza
I don't take seriously the part of Trump's plan for Gaza where the US claims ownership of the land and turns it into a Mediterranean resort. I think he announced that just to troll us.
However, the part of the plan where Israel ethnically cleanses Gaza, while the US pressures Arab nations to take in Gazan refugees -- that seems completely serious. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates will meet in Riyadh Thursday to formulate an alternative, which they will hope to take to the larger Arab League meeting in Cairo next week.
I want to make two points about this. First, unlike the West Bank, Israel does not have any historical claim on Gaza. Even in Biblical times, Gaza was a Philistine city.
Second, I want to address the comparison being made to the population transfers that happened in 1946-48 when the former British Raj was partitioned into India and Pakistan. This argument has been put forward by WSJ columnist Sadanand Dhume, and echoes a claim often made by opponents of a Palestinian state: There are already nearly two dozen Arab countries, so why does there need to be another one?
Dhume glosses over what a disaster the partition of India was.
By 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than fifteen million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million were dead.
Also, proponents of the Palestinians-are-just-Arabs vision are projecting a Jewish notion of identity onto Arabs. Arabs have never had a unified ethnic identity. While it's true that many Palestinians did not identify as Palestinians until comparatively recently, prior to that they identified primarily with their local communities, not with some larger Arab nation. Palestinian identity comes up from below, not down from above.
Dhume paints the international refusal to support an ethnic cleansing in Gaza as "the world's double standard towards Israel". Actually, it is a single-standard reaction to the horror of the post-World-War-II population transfers.
I have not yet read Peter Beinart's new book "Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza". However, this interview with The New Yorker is worth a look.
and you also might be interested in ...
Politics is all fun and games until you have to write a budget. House Republicans took their first step in that direction by passing a budget resolution out of committee and sending it to the full house. It cuts rich people's taxes, lines up cuts in Medicaid and food stamps, and allows $3.3 trillion more debt to accumulate in the next ten years. It's already in trouble as Republican congresspeople reckon with the number of Medicaid recipients in their districts.
[D]espite the rapid infusion of resources, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is struggling to arrest higher numbers of immigrants and falling far short of the administration’s goals.
Simple reason: The invasion of criminals that Trump talked so much about during his campaign was never real. He talked a lot about unleashing local law enforcement to deport the criminal migrants because "they already know who they are". And maybe that was true for a handful of people, but there were never "millions" of migrant criminals to deport.
The WaPo's Catherine Rampell:
What Trump has done for US farmers so far:
-frozen their foreign aid program (and left their food to rot)
-encouraged EU to ban their products
-frozen legally-owed reimbursements for their energy efficiency upgrades etc.
-threatened to deport half their workforce
-suppressed research on bird flu
Paul Krugman explains why everything Trump is proposing -- tariffs, deporting low-wage workers ... -- will make inflation worse. But he warns against buying inflation-protected Treasury bonds (TIPS), because they'll only protect you against "future inflation that the U.S. government admits is happening". Once Trump appointees start reporting the numbers Trump wants to hear, officially recognized inflation will plummet, no matter what is happening to your groceries.
The Daily Show explains how to Un-DEI your office.
Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker has made a series of announcements: (1) Lake Michigan has been renamed Lake Illinois, (2) Illinois is annexing Green Bay for security purposes, and (3) stay tuned for an announcement regarding the Mississippi River next week.
and let's close with something musical
Back in 2020, the pandemic forced choirs to figure out how to synchronize without being in the same room. The Unitarian Universalist General Assembly went virtual that year, and this choral performance was created for it. I find "Let the wave wash over me" to be a particularly comforting thought these days.
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