The Weekly Sift

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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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 …

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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DOGE cuts are literally killing people.

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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.

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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.

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

– Senator Cory Booker

This week’s featured posts are “Is this a turning point?” and “On Tariffs and the Markets“.

This week everybody was talking about tariffs and the resulting stock market crash

That’s the topic of one of the featured posts.

and the “Hands Off” protests

Saturday’s protests at 1400 locations around the country had been planned for some time. But they got a huge boost from a week of bad news for the Trump administration, which I summarize in the other featured post.

Good estimates of how many people participated are hard to come by. Organizers tend to inflate numbers, while news organizations and public-safety departments usually underestimate. Then there’s the problem of combining over a thousand individual estimates into a collective estimate.

The organizers of these protests claim “millions” of participants. And that total sounds reasonable when you see police estimates like 25-30 thousand in Boston alone, or NYT reporting of a march 20 blocks long in New York.

and Cory Booker’s speech

The political impact of Cory Booker’s record-breaking 25-hour speech to the Senate surprised me. It was a stunt, of course. The speech itself produced no direct change in law or policy. And yet it drew massive amounts of public attention and made an important symbolic statement: Yes, Democrats in Congress do realize that American democracy is at a crisis point, and they are looking for ways to do something about it.

The point of a stunt is to draw attention, and Booker certainly did. An estimated 300K viewers livestreamed at least part his speech, and the Tik-Tok stream got 350 million likes.

Like many stunts, Booker’s speech was a feat of physical endurance. He had to remain standing for the full 25 hours, and didn’t take any bathroom breaks. He didn’t have to speak the entire time, because allies in the Senate took up some time by asking him occasional questions. I had thought he would wear Depends or have some kind of catheter strapped to his leg, but apparently not.

I think I stopped eating on Friday, and then to stop drinking the night before I started on Monday, and that had its benefits and it had its really downsides.

I believe I would faint dead away or start hallucinating if I tried that. But Booker mainly reported muscle cramps from dehydration.

A side benefit of Booker’s speech was to take arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond out of the record books. Thurmond’s previous record-holder was a 24-hour speech against a civil rights bill in 1957. Unlike Thurmond, who resorted to reading the phone book at one point, Booker remained on-topic and empassioned right up to the end.

That’s due largely to the changing times, I think. Thurmond was filibustering, so the time he took up was an end in itself. While Booker did interrupt the business of the Senate for 25 hours, there was no particular action he intended to delay. He was trying to build and hang onto a worldwide audience, an impossibility in 1957.

and Wisconsin voters’ rejection of Elon

A number of election were held Tuesday. The most significant was for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Liberals achieved a 4-3 majority on the court two years ago, and had begun to undo a gerrymander that had put the Republican leadership of the legislature virtually beyond the reach of voters. Wisconsin’s congressional districts are similarly gerrymandered, so that the evenly divided state sends 6 Republicans and only 2 Democrats to the U. S. House. If the conservative had won, flipping the court to a 4-3 conservative majority, that gerrymander would likely have remained.

Elon Musk made himself a major issue in the election by contributing quantities of money variously reported in the $20-25 million range. His contributions were controversial and possibly illegal: He gave voters $100 each to sign a petition denouncing “activist judges”, and offered two million-dollar checks to voters who came to a rally he headlined in Green Bay. Musk claimed “the future of civilization” hung on the outcome of this election.

But apparently Wisconsin voters don’t want the richest many in the world choosing their judges: the Trump/Musk candidate lost 55%-45%.

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Tuesday’s other elections are harder to interpret. Two special elections for Florida congressional seats went to the Republicans, but only by about half the 30-point margin Trump had in those districts in November. Democrats may take encouragement from those elections — and Republicans whose districts were only +15 in November may get anxious — but a loss is still a loss.

and you also might be interested in …

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was granted protected status by an immigration judge in 2019, so the government has been specifically barred from sending him back to El Salvador, where he says he would be in danger. The government has claimed that he is in the infamous MS-13 gang, but has never presented evidence supporting that claim.

Nonetheless, Garcia got pulled over while driving on March 12 (his 5-year-old in the back seat) and was sent to the gulag in El Salvador where the administration has been dumping immigrants it doesn’t like. The government has acknowledged the mistake in court (and the lawyer who acknowledged this obvious fact has been put on leave).

[Judge Paula] Xinis on Sunday wrote in a legal opinion that allegations against Abrego were “vague” and “uncorroborated” –– and that in any case, he was under protected status.

“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” she wrote.

She ordered him returned to the US by today, which the Trump administration is refusing to do while it appeals her order. Absurdly, they claim that Garcia is now out of their control, since they do not run El Salvador. If this claim is allowed, it puts a loophole in everyone‘s rights. Trump could arrest me or you, send us to El Salvador, and then claim it made a “mistake” that can’t be rectified.

In one featured post I covered how Fox News has played down the stock-market collapse. Here’s how Fox handled this story: Numerous Fox hosts have argued that Garcia is just one guy, and he’s an immigrant anyway, and Trump’s people claim (without evidence) he’s part of a criminal gang, so it doesn’t matter.

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It turns out there’s an internal reason why the Trump administration keeps running afoul of judges, and it has nothing to do with judicial bias.

In previous administrations (even Trump’s first administration), the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice has been powerful. Essentially, it’s been the executive branch’s internal Supreme Court, the ultimate within-the-administration authority on what the law says or allows. OLC reports are technical and sometimes secret, so they usually slide under most voters’ radar. But occasionally some have drawn attention, like during the Bush-43 administration when OLC came up with creative readings of the law to justify torture.

The head of OLC is a political appointee, so it’s not like OLC has ever been completely independent of the White House. For the most part, it’s going to give the president the most favorable opinion it can justify. Nonetheless, OLC is made up of lawyers who have certain professional standards. They don’t like being pushed to frame opinions so far out of line that judges will sanction administration lawyers who make those arguments in court.

That’s why it’s significant that the Trump administration has downgraded the OLC. Trump still has not named the OLC’s head, and the office has not vetted Trump’s executive orders for legality. It’s part of the larger pattern: No one should tell Trump that he can’t do what he wants to do, even if it’s illegal.

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This looks ominous:

The Pentagon has sent at least six B-2 bombers – 30% of the US Air Force’s stealth bomber fleet – to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, in what analysts have called a message to Iran as tensions once again flare in the Middle East. … Images taken by private satellite imaging company Planet Labs on Tuesday show the six US bombers on the tarmac on the island, as well as shelters that could possibly conceal others.

Maybe this is a ramping up of the campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, which the US attacked in mid-March. But it might be something else:

Trump has also been pushing Iran to make a deal over its nuclear capabilities, saying on March 19 that he would give Tehran two months to come to an agreement or face the consequences. There “are two ways Iran can be handled: militarily, or you make a deal.”

The Eyes Only blog adds this bit of interpretation:

the B-2 isn’t just any bomber. It’s the only US aircraft certified to carry the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound bunker-busting message written in steel and fire. That’s tailor-made for Iran’s deeply buried nuclear sites in places like Natanz and Fordow.

and let’s close with something useless

In addition to all the news-relevant topics I have to research to write this blog, you probably have no idea how much totally useless knowledge I accumulate along the way. This week I learned that the word ritzy derives from a man’s name: César Ritz was a Swiss businessman who founded the Ritz hotels, which became synonymous with luxury.

He opened The Ritz in Paris in 1898, and shortly afterward the upscale Carlton Hotel in London. The North American rights to the Ritz-Carlton brand was franchised to Albert Keller, who opened New York’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel in 1911.

The Ritz cracker appears to have no direct connection to either the hotels or César Ritz. In 1919, Nabisco bought Jackson Cracker company of Jackson, Michigan, which made a precursor of the Ritz. That cracker got rebranded as Ritz during the Depression, as part of a marketing plan to make it seem luxurious. (Apparently, in that less litigious age, the Ritz hotels didn’t sue.) The Ritz cracker also appears to be the first beneficiary of a movie marketing tie-in: Walt Disney included a box of Ritz crackers in Mickey’s Surprise Party in 1939. The Wikipedia article does not mention whether Walt got paid to do this.

Every time I open my phone to read the news, I kind of just stare at the wall for 10 minutes. It’s horrifying what they’re doing, not only to the trans community, but also to migrants, to communities of color, to so many marginalized communities that are being systematically targeted by the new administration and having protections revoked. It’s cartoonishly evil.

– Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s trans daughter

This week’s featured post is “Politics in the Attention Economy“.

This week everybody was talking about the rule of law

From the moment Trump took office, the big question has been whether his administration would obey court orders. We may be about to find out. Federal Judge James Boasberg ordered that the planes of Venezuelans being renditioned to El Salvador not take off, or be turned around if they had not yet landed. But prisoners were delivered to El Salvador all the same. Now he’s trying to get the government to tell him when exactly the planes took off and landed, and he’s being stonewalled. (More about that case below.)

Trump’s lawyers are claiming that they didn’t violate the court order, but their arguments are flimsy. Jack Goldsmith, the former head of George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel inside the Justice Department, described the lawyers as “playing games that verge on defiance”. Goldsmith’s article is a good summary of the legal issues in the case.

Openly defying court orders — especially a Supreme Court order — is a clear line that would define Trump as an autocrat.

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There’s a fundamental fact about rights that I don’t think most Americans understand. I was writing about it during the Bush administration, when “enemy combatants” were being whisked away into military custody, and it comes up again now: If there is anybody who doesn’t have habeas corpus rights, then nobody has rights.

This comes up now because of the alleged Venezuelan gangsters that the Trump administration took off the streets and flew to a prison in El Salvador. Trump’s supporters want the debate to be about whether or not these are bad guys, as in “Why are you taking the side of immigrant gangsters who victimize law-abiding American citizens?”

And who knows? Maybe they are bad guys. (Or maybe not.) Maybe we are all safer because they’re locked up. But that’s not the most important issue here.

Imagine, just for a moment, that somebody scooped you up and put you on a plane to be imprisoned in El Salvador. Probably your first reaction to that suggestion is “That could never happen because I’m an American citizen. They couldn’t do that to me.”

And you’re right: They couldn’t do it legally. But what if your name wound up on a list either by mistake or because you have an enemy somewhere inside the Trump administration or because some ICE officer was too enthusiastic about rounding people up? What if you were put on that plane without a hearing, the way the supposed gang members were? When would you have had a chance to offer evidence that you are an American citizen?

If the answer is “never”, then yes, they can do it to you. Because who stops them?

Habeas corpus means that anybody who is imprisoned has a right to state their case to somebody who is (1) impartial between the prisoner and his accusers, and (2) has the power to order the prisoner’s release.

If there’s a loophole in habeas corpus, then anybody — literally anybody — can vanish down that hole.

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The Homeland Security Department is firing the people who worry about stuff like that: 100 people from three oversight offices have been let go.

“These offices have obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS’s mission,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Rather than supporting law enforcement efforts, they often function as internal adversaries that slow down operations.“

That’s the problem in a nutshell: Inside the Trump administration, human rights like habeas corpus are “bureaucratic hurdles”. If the immigration enforcement people want to do something illegal, nobody should slow that operation down.

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The administration seems to be obeying court orders to rehire many of the government workers it fired. Some are returning to the job, some have been put on administrative leave, and others are still waiting to hear.

When a probationary worker goes from being fired to being on leave, that may not look like much of a victory. But the bureaucratic fiction behind the firing was that the workers were all fired “for cause”, which means they would be ineligible to collect unemployment benefits. So rather than being cut off from all income, they’re getting their regular paycheck again.

It’s worth pointing out that in the name of “government efficiency”, we’re paying people to stay home. Also, many of the contracts DOGE has cancelled will eventually have to be paid for. When all is said and done, I wonder if Musk isn’t costing taxpayers money rather than saving us money.

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Vox’ Ian Millhiser says that of the 132 lawsuits against the Trump administration, you should watch two: the ones about impoundment and birthright citizenship.

No competent lawyer, and certainly no reasonable judge, could conclude that Trump’s actions in either case are lawful. There is no serious debate about what the Constitution says about either issue. If the Court rules in favor of Trump in either case, it’s hard to imagine the justices offering any meaningful pushback to anything Trump wants to do.

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MAGA folks sometimes claim they have nothing against immigrants, just illegal immigrants. But why then is Trump shutting down avenues for legal immigration? Friday, DHS announced that (as of April 24) it is revoking the legal status of half a million Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who came here as part of a Biden-administration humanitarian parole program. Participants had to have US sponsors. They were granted work permits and a two-year parole from deportation.

Like so many Trump actions, this order is needlessly cruel. These people did nothing wrong, trusted US government promises, and made plans accordingly. Many of them presumably have jobs and leases. Trump could have just waited for their two-year paroles expire. But no, they have a month to leave the country.

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Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik described “the imperial boomerang effect”:

[T]echniques developed to repress colonised territories and peoples will, in time, inevitably be deployed at home. Repressive policing, methods of detention and controlling dissent, forcing humans to produce goods and services for overlords in the metropolis, or even mass enslavement and killing: all “boomerang” back into that metropolis. First, they are used against those who are seen as inferior; then, they are deployed even against those citizens with full rights and privileges if they dare to question authority. In short, the remote other eventually becomes the intimate familiar.

and Social Security

Since my wife made more money in her career than I did, I am eligible for higher Social Security benefits as her survivor than on my own employment record. The system is swamped because the SSA is understaffed, so I had to spend a lot of time on hold when I applied over the phone in February. But at least I was home and able to do other things while I waited.

Thank God I got that done before the new rules kicked in:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) says it will no longer allow beneficiaries and those applying for Social Security to confirm their identity over the phone and will instead require that they do so online or in person at a local office to complete the application process.

Simultaneously, SSA is closing local offices and firing staff.

In 2023 about 119,000 people visited local Social Security offices daily to get help or receive services. The SSA announced plans last month to reduce its workforce by 12 percent, from about 57,000 employees to 50,000, and multiple offices have been closed in recent weeks, according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the office established by President Donald Trump to slash federal spending. … SSA staffing was already near a 50-year low when the agency initiated the planned reductions.

The Popular Information blog draws the obvious conclusion:

The combination of fewer workers, fewer offices, and a massive increase in the demand for in-person services could sabotage the Social Security system — effectively denying many Americans the benefits they are due.

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According to MAGA propaganda, Democrats are out of touch with ordinary Americans. Well, listen to this: Billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggests that the best way to find fraudsters in the Social Security system would be to just not send out checks some month.

Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who is 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining.

Elon [Musk] knows this by heart. Anyone who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find a fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Because whoever screams is the one stealing!

Before Social Security, elderly Americans were more likely than any other age group to be living in poverty. (Elderly and disabled poverty are the most hopeless kinds, because your earning prospects are so low.) Now they are the least likely to be poor. That’s what Social Security has meant to America.

But if you’re a billionaire like Lutnick, or a centi-billionaire like Musk, you find it hard to imagine that a check not arriving some month might mean that you don’t get to eat, or that you might care enough about not eating that you might complain. Those are the kind of people who are running our country now.

and sabotaging the US tourism industry

Becky Burke from Wales was on a backpacking trip across North America when she was arrested by ICE and held for 19 days. Then she was taken to an airport in leg irons and sent home to the UK. Her crime? She did housework in exchange for a free room, which apparently broke the no-employment condition of her tourist visa.

How many tourist dollars does the US lose every time there’s a story like this?

Similar stories are being told by Germans.

Here’s another story, this time from a Canadian: Nathan Kalman-Lamb, a sociology professor at the University of New Brunswick. Having previously been denied entry to the US, he went through the bureaucratic steps necessary to be assured of admittance, which included an interview with someone from the State Department. This time he was detained for three hours and thoroughly searched, causing him to miss his flight.

Both times, Kalman-Lamb was coming to the US to promote his new book The End of College Football. Exploitation of college athletes has been his special focus in recent years.

Kalman-Lamb’s crime seems to be having opinions about Palestine and Israel. He signed a statement supporting a pro-Palestinian protest encampment at the University of Toronto (where he is an alum) and is a supporter of the movement to divest from Israel. (He has also written articles whose titles include words like gender and intersectionality.) His opinions have caused him to be fingered by the pro-Israel website Canary Mission as “pro-Hamas” and “antisemitic”.

Kalman-Lamb posted Friday:

Well, I have successfully made it in (and now, thank god, out) of the United States. Idk if/when I will be back—which is sad, because I love US folks.

Tourism has been a major industry in the US. Expect it to crater this year. The US is becoming known as a risky place to travel.

and you also might be interested in …

I think Jon Ossoff has the right Democratic message in this one-and-a-half minute clip.

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RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines has begun:

National Institutes of Health officials have urged scientists to remove all references to mRNA vaccine technology from their grant applications, two researchers said, in a move that signaled the agency might abandon a promising field of medical research. … The mRNA technology is under study at the NIH for prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, including flu and AIDS, and also cancer. It was deployed in the development of covid-19 vaccines credited with saving 3 million lives in the U.S. alone — an accomplishment President Donald Trump bragged about in his first term.

A scientist at a biomedical research center in Philadelphia wrote to a colleague, in an email reviewed by KFF Health News, that a project officer at NIH had “flagged our pending grant as having an mRNA vaccine component.”

“It’s still unclear whether mRNA vaccine grants will be canceled,” the scientist added.

In some ways RFK Jr. is worse than an ideologue; he’s a crank, the kind of amateur who thinks he’s smarter than the consensus of the scientific community. Anti-scientific ideas get into his head and no amount of evidence will get them out.

He has already cancelled research into vaccine hesitancy, i.e., public resistance to being vaccinated. It may cost countless lives every year and allow the resurgence of previously eradicated diseases like measles, which now has more than 300 cases in Texas alone. But to him it’s not a public health problem. Worse from his point of view, research would probably attribute much of the problem to disinformation-spreaders like Kennedy himself.

On the subject of cranks, I like this exchange from the 1967 version of Bedazzled.

Stanley Moon: You’re a nutcase! You’re a bleedin’ nutcase!
George Spiggott: They said the same of Jesus Christ, Freud, and Galileo.
Stanley Moon: They said it of a lot of nutcases too.

The Guardian examines vaccine hesitancy in one American city: Sarasota.

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I’ll let a WaPo editorial sum up the situation in Gaza:

In Gaza, a ceasefire deal that came into effect when Trump took office — and for which he took full credit — has effectively collapsed. With Israel and Hamas at a stalemate over whether to extend the ceasefire or move on to fresh talks on ending the conflict, Netanyahu has resumed a full-scale bombing of the enclave. More than 400 Palestinians were killed and hundreds of others were injured on Tuesday, one of the deadliest days of the war.

The official death toll in Gaza is now over 50,000.

The NYT documented the losses of the Abu Naser family, four generations of which lived in a single five-story apartment building in Gaza. 132 of them died in a single Israeli attack. The entire neighborhood is now rubble.

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At a time when DOGE is cancelling many government contracts, Elon Musk’s businesses are in line to get much bigger contracts than they’ve ever had before.

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The dismantling of the Department of Education has begun.

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Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan jailed his most serious challenger in the next elections. Protesters across the country were met with substantial police violence. Over 1000 protesters have been arrested.

The day before, Saturday, Trump’s chief negotiator Steve Witkoff said this to Tucker Carlson:

the President had a great conversation with Erdogan a couple of days ago. Really transformational, I would describe it. I think it’s been underreported, to tell you the truth. … I think the President has a relationship with Erdogan and that’s going to be important. And there’s some good coming – just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey right now as a result of that conversation. So I think you’ll see that in the reporting in the coming days.

I have to wonder if part of the conversation was “Go ahead. Crack down on the opposition.” Or if the current unrest is part of the “good news” Witkoff was expecting.

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Witkoff’s comments about Ukraine are also striking. Up front, he grants most of what Putin wants: Russia will get the parts of Ukraine it currently occupies. Ukraine will not join NATO. What Ukraine will get out of this deal is left vague. And he takes seriously the referendums Russia held in the occupied Ukrainian provinces, as if those were fair elections:

They’re Russian speaking. There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.

He also promises to back down any time Putin threatens nuclear war, even if it means not getting a “fair deal” for Ukraine.

And while I think we have to get a fair deal for Ukraine, we cannot allow that country to drag us into World War Three.

And he completely ignores Putin’s rhetoric about Ukraine being an illegitimate country that has always been part of Russia.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think the Russians want to march across Europe?

STEVE WITKOFF: 100% not.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why would they want that? I wouldn’t want those countries. Like, why would they.

STEVE WITKOFF: First of all, why would they want to absorb Ukraine? For what purpose, exactly? They don’t need to absorb Ukraine. That would be like occupying Gaza. Why do the Israelis really want to occupy Gaza for the rest of their lives? They don’t. They want stability there they don’t want to deal with. But the Russians also have what they want. They’ve gotten—they’ve reclaimed these five regions. They have Crimea, and they’ve gotten what they want. So why do they need more?

I don’t know. After Chamberlain gave Hitler the Sudetenland at Munich, why did he need the rest of Czechoslovakia?

And the idea that Putin doesn’t want to reclaim dominance over Warsaw Pact countries like Estonia and Poland, what does Witkoff base that on? And “I wouldn’t want those countries”? How do Polish-Americans feel about that?

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Trump is using the power of government to extort concessions from non-government institutions: Columbia University and a major law firm are the latest trophies for Trump’s mantle. This is the Orban model from Hungary.

and let’s close with an opportunity

You still have until Sunday to enter the National Wildlife Federation’s annual photo contest. Here’s the second-place photo from the bird section of last year’s contest: a parakeet attacking a lizard.

When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism

– Steven Levitsky

This week’s featured post is “Those Mysterious Tariffs“.

This week everybody was talking about Ukraine

Pundits struggled to make sense of the Oval Office meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy on February 28, but nobody nailed it better than Jon Stewart: Trump and the Republicans just like Putin better. Stewart made an extended metaphor about a pro wrestling scene in which apparent good-guy John Cena sneak attacks a fellow good-guy wrestler.

Creating tension with Ukraine in the Oval Office meeting “was a ‘heel turn’ designed to create the alliance Trump always wanted in the first place,” Stewart explained, referring to the pro-wrestling narrative device in which a fan-favorite character changes to become a storyline’s villain.

Another way to understand the meeting is to take “Trump is Putin’s puppet” literally. Trump told Zelenskyy exactly what Putin would have told him had he been there: Surrender or World War III starts.

I have to wonder whether Trump can speak while Putin drinks a glass of water.

After the meeting, Trump withdrew all military aid from Ukraine, including intelligence. Time reports:

The Ukrainians have lost the ability to detect the approach of Russian bombers and other warplanes as they take off inside Russia. As a result, Ukraine has less time to warn civilians and military personnel about the risk of an approaching airstrike or missile.

The result: “hundreds of dead Ukrainians”.

Since the end of World War II, the United States has stood for collective security based on alliances with other democratic nations and resistance to aggression by dictators. We haven’t always applied those principles consistently, but we never explicitly rejected them. Now we do. If dictators want to take over their neighbors, that’s their business.

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BTW: Trump’s cocksure assertion that Zelenskyy “doesn’t have the cards” because Ukraine is losing on the battlefield is another example of Putin’s puppetry. The battlefield is not going well for either side. Both countries are facing exhaustion, and while Russian forces are advancing slowly, at this pace it will take many years to conquer Ukraine.

and tariffs

Trump whipsawed the markets these last two weeks with a series of announcements about tariffs being imposed or postponed. That’s the topic of the featured post. But in that post I didn’t get around to making the obvious prediction: Capital spending is going to collapse, and is probably already collapsing, because companies and investors can’t trust their projections of where the economy is headed. Ditto for households, who can’t predict whether the government spending cuts are going to affect their jobs. (Maybe you can build that new bedroom onto your house, or maybe you’re going to need a cushion in case you’ll be unemployed.) So money is going to sit on the sidelines, and that is going to start a recession.

and the budget

Thursday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office confirmed what should have been obvious to everyone: The budget outline that the House passed recently is going to make substantial cuts to Medicaid.

House Republicans last week narrowly passed a budget instructing the energy and commerce committee, which is responsible for federal healthcare, to cut spending under its jurisdiction by $880bn … The independent in-house agency confirmed that it would be impossible to reduce spending by $880bn without cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chip). That’s because after excluding Medicare, Medicaid and Chip, the committee oversees only $381bn in spending – much less than the $880bn target – the CBO said.

There’s a pretty clear game-plan of deceit here.

• Start by claiming to protect safety-net programs Americans — especially Americans in the poorer, more rural Republican districts — depend on.
• Announce plans to cut those general areas, but deny that the cuts will affect those programs, even if the math doesn’t work without such cuts.
• Cut those programs, but claim that only “waste and fraud” will be affected.
• Refuse to pay for your kid’s healthcare and/or kick your mother out of her nursing home.

We’re already hearing rhetoric about how deep cuts in federal spending are “necessary”, because the $36-trillion-and-rising federal debt is unsustainable. But no matter how dire a picture Republicans paint of our fiscal situation, taxing rich people is never an option.

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House Republicans are committed to not negotiating with Democrats about either the FY 2026 budget or the continuing resolution to fund the rest of FY 2025, which is needed to prevent a government shutdown on Friday. Democrats want a commitment that whatever funding they pass is meaningful, and won’t just get frozen by Musk or Trump. Republicans want to give Trump maximum flexibility, even if it means surrendering Congress’ power of the purse.

In order to do that, they’ll need to hold all their members together, which they’ve never managed before. But maybe this time they can.

and Trump’s speech to Congress

which I didn’t watch (though I did quickly scan a transcript). I don’t see the point, since nothing Trump says can be believed. The Guardian fact checks the speech’s biggest whoppers. Since Trump has been corrected on these fake facts before, they are clearly intentional lies.

The biggest one was his claim that Elon Musk has uncovered “massive fraud”. So far, Musk has said the word “fraud” a lot, but he hasn’t provided any evidence of it. Quite likely, Musk has not uncovered any fraud.

Trump’s speech lasted a record-setting 100 minutes, reminiscent of the hours-long speeches dictators like Cuba’s Fidel Castro used to give.

Like me, James Fallows more or less ignored the speech’s content, focusing instead on its symptomology. He noticed four things:

• Trump’s rhetorical range is shrinking. He used some form of his “like nothing ever seen before” cliche 20 times during the speech. By contrast, he said it only once in his first inaugural address, and it rarely appeared in his first-term State of the Union addresses. Similarly, “incredible” has become his dominant positive adjective, appearing six times.
• More alarmingly, Fallows notes that all types of Trump speeches — MAGA rallies, presidential addresses, press conferences, televised Oval Office talks — have collapsed into one form. The broader press commented on how rally-like this speech was, but missed the larger point that all Trump speeches are basically the same now.
• Recent presidential addresses to Congress have included heckling from the opposing party (going back to Joe Wilson’s “You lie” directed at Obama in 2009). But this was the first time a president has abused members of Congress: Trump called Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” from the podium.
• Presidents almost always spin or shade the truth in these speeches, and occasionally have even lied outright. But Trump’s lying has reached a completely different level. Lying is no longer an attempt to fool people, because some of Trump’s lies are so transparent — Social Security is paying benefits to people it thinks are 200 years old — that no one will believe them. Instead, lying has become an expression of power. “To me, Trump’s body-language—his bearing, mood, and presentation—suggested that the grossness of the lies was the point of the exercise. Preening in the knowledge that he could get away with it, and that he could make his minions applaud.”

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Newly elected Democratic Senator Elissa Slotkin needed only 10 minutes to respond.

We just went through another fraught election season. Americans made it clear that prices are too high and that government needs to be more responsive to their needs. America wants change. But there is a responsible way to make change, and a reckless way. And, we can make that change without forgetting who we are as a country, and as a democracy.

She talked about the economy:

President Trump is trying to deliver an unprecedented giveaway to his billionaire friends. He’s on the hunt to find trillions of dollars to pass along to the wealthiest in America. And to do that, he’s going to make you pay in every part of your life. Grocery and home prices are going up, not down — and he hasn’t laid out a credible plan to deal with either. His tariffs on allies like Canada will raise prices on energy, lumber, cars — and start a trade war that will hurt manufacturing and farmers. Your premiums and prescriptions will cost more because the math on his proposals doesn’t work without going after your health care. Meanwhile, for those keeping score, the national debt is going up, not down. And if he’s not careful, he could walk us right into a recession.

And national security:

[T]hat scene in the Oval Office wasn’t just a bad episode of reality TV. It summed up Trump’s whole approach to the world. He believes in cozying up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and kicking our friends, like Canada, in the teeth. He sees American leadership as merely a series of real estate transactions. …

[O]ur democracy, our very system of government, has been the aspiration of the world. And right now, it’s at risk. It’s at risk when a president decides he can pick and choose what rules he wants to follow, when he ignores court orders or the Constitution itself, or when elected leaders stand idly by and just let it happen. But it’s also at risk when the President pits Americans against each other, when he demonizes those who are different, and tells certain people they shouldn’t be included. Because America is not just a patch of land between two oceans. We are more than that. Generations have fought and died to secure the fundamental rights that define us. Those rights and the fight for them make us who we are.

and Tesla

For years, Elon Musk’s public image worked to Tesla’s benefit. He was Tony Stark. He was to our world what Hank Rearden was to Atlas Shrugged. And Tesla had a technology lead over rival electric-car companies. So Teslas weren’t just good cars, they were cool. Driving a Tesla was a virtue signal; it told the world you were serious about climate change.

Then he bought Twitter and made the online world safe for Nazis. He spent $290 million to elect Donald Trump. He addressed a rally for the AfD, calling that neo-Nazi party “the best hope for the future of Germany.”

His Trump contributions bought him the extra-constitutional power to cut government programs, fire civil-service workers, and shut down agencies created by Congress. (The Atlas Shrugged character he most resembles now is Wesley Mouch, head of the Bureau of Economic Planning and National Resources.) Has medical research ground to a halt in Musk’s America? Are children starving in Africa while food rots in US ports? What a shame.

Suddenly, people who had been willing to pay a virtue premium for a Tesla are instead looking for a vice discount. It isn’t just that competitors have caught up to Tesla (which they have). In many people’s minds, a Tesla would have to be a lot better than the next best EV to make up for the stigma of driving a “Swasticar“.

And in case you hadn’t noticed that stigma, anti-Musk demonstrators are showing up at Tesla showrooms to remind you. Saturday, Tesla Takedowns erupted all over the US, with 350 protesters in Manhattan alone.

In Europe as well, Tesla’s problems are growing: In Germany, sales were down 60% in January and 76% in February.

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Maybe you were horrified by Musk’s statement (in a Joe Rogan interview) about empathy.

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” Musk said. “There it’s they’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.

Well, you should know that seeing empathy as an exploitable weakness isn’t just a psychological quirk Musk has because he’s on the spectrum. It’s become a thing on the Right. A conservative Christian author has a book out called Toxic Empathy: How progressives exploit Christian compassion.

We are told that empathy is the highest virtue—the key to being a good person. Is that true? Or has “empathy,” like so many other words of our day—“tolerance,” “justice,” “acceptance”—been hijacked by bad actors who exploit compassion for their own political ends?

Yep. If you find yourself feeling sorry for bombed-out communities in Gaza, hungry children in Africa, or working-class families losing their health insurance in the US, it’s a trap. Jesus wouldn’t want you to fall for it. “Love your neighbor” now means something else entirely.

David French comments:

That’s one reason you’ll often see a shocking amount of derision online when anyone starts talking about the human toll of Trump’s decisions. His MAGA evangelicals are broadcasting that you cannot reach them with anything that looks like an appeal to the heart. … It’s also just bizarre to argue that describing the consequences of a policy is somehow emotionally manipulative when avoiding those consequences was the purpose of the program that’s being frozen or cut.

So, yes, you say that children might die without a certain program when the very purpose of the program is to prevent children from dying. That’s not manipulation. It’s confronting individuals with facts. It’s making them understand exactly what they are choosing to do.

and you also might be interested in …

Paul Krugman looks at Trump’s “Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve” plan and concludes that it’s a gigantic pump-and-dump scheme. Even if you believe it’s somehow on the up-and-up, this observation should trouble you:

What would the U.S. government do with this reserve? Make payoffs to gangsters? Buy favors from rogue governments like North Korea? I guess it could, in a pinch, sell the stuff to raise money if people have lost trust in the U.S. government’s solvency, but surely it would be a better strategy to stay solvent — among other things by not borrowing to buy assets that will probably crash in value if and when America tries try to sell them.

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HHS has notified the State of Maine that its policy allowing transgender athletes to compete in school sports violates Title IX

by denying female student athletes in the State of Maine an equal opportunity to participate in, and obtain the benefits of participation, “in any interscholastic, intercollegiate, club or intramural athletics” offered by the state by allowing male athletes to compete against female athletes in current and future athletic events.

The Maine Attorney General’s Office was notified on Feb. 21 that the DHHS Office for Civil Rights started a compliance review of the Maine DOE, including the University of Maine System. A spokesperson for the Maine Attorney General’s Office said federal investigators did not interview anyone in their office.

Whenever we talk about trans issues, especially trans athletes, it’s important to realize just how few cases, and how little impact on cis-women’s rights, we’re talking about. HHS’ letter identifies two cases:

• A trans pole vaulter won the state Class B championship.
• A trans skier finished third and fourth in events at the state Class C championships.

In the 2023 Maine Integrated Youth Health Survey, 4.5% of high school students reported a transgender identity. (That seems high to me, but what do I know?) If we picked some random group comprising 4.5% of students, that group would also probably contain a few successful athletes. So I don’t see evidence that Maine’s policy is distorting girls’ sports in any meaningful way.

A BlueSky poster brings the numbers home:

As of today, there are more kids infected with measles than there are trans athletes playing in college sports in the U.S.

In general, I disapprove of the Right’s tendency to make policy by anecdote. (Another example is to base immigration policy on anecdotes about misbehaving immigrants. Hitler’s Nazis used to publicize every “Jewish crime” they could find, for similar reasons.) Anecdotal policy lends itself to prejudice, because only the anecdotes that fit the ruling bias are allowed to count. For example, there are countless stories of boys and girls being abused by Christian ministers. Should Christian churches be shut down to prevent this? Of course not, because Christians are much more popular than transfolk.

The upshot of HHS’ letter is a referral to the Department of Justice for enforcement.

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Various free-trade agreements have established an Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process “to protect foreign businesses from state corruption and theft”, but these days it’s being used by companies whose investments are affected by a nation’s environmental laws. Right now, Greenland is being sued by a mining company because it shut down uranium mining in 2021. The company says it had invested $100 million in the site, but it is suing for $11.5 billion, based on what their mine would be worth had it been successfully developed.

That case motivated The Guardian to look at other ISDS suits, and the “chilling effect” they have on governments’ attempts to limit fossil fuels. In short, every time a country tries to protect its environment, it may have to pay a ransom to the parties who feel entitled to exploit that resource.

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The Netanyahu government’s war against the independence of the judiciary branch has resumed.

and let’s close with a great relief

A Chilean kayaker was scooped up by the mouth of a humpback whale, and then spit back out. He was unharmed.

Humpback whales aren’t actually looking for large prey like humans. They typically suck in large quantities of seawater and filter it for krill and other small morsels. But that’s probably hard to remember when you find yourself in one’s mouth.

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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

LawDork elaborates:

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.

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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.

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The WaPo:

[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.

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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

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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.

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The Daily Show explains how to Un-DEI your office.

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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.