Call it what it is: An oligarchic purge. And ‘A Blitzkrieg Of Lawlessness’:
“Without any doubt Donald Trump is the most lawless and scofflaw president we have ever seen in the history of the United States,” said Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars and a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.
Tribe said Trump has carried out “a blitzkrieg on the law and the constitution. The very fact that the illegal actions have come out with the speed of a rapidly firing Gatling gun makes it very hard for people to focus on any one of them. That’s obviously part of the strategy.”
Federal judges moved quickly to temporarily block the spending freeze and the ban on birthright citizenship. Last Tuesday, a federal district court judge in Washington DC, Loren AliKhan, suspended the spending freeze. Facing huge confusion and criticism over the freeze, the Trump administration rescinded it on Wednesday.
On 23 January, a federal district judge in Seattle, John Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee, temporarily blocked Trump’s order to end birthright citizenship. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” Coughenour said. “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.”
Late last Monday, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, a member of the NLRB, and two members of the EEOC, Charlotte Burrows and Jocelyn Samuels. All three – members of independent boards – were appointed by Democratic presidents and had several years left in their terms.
Kate Andrias, a professor of constitutional law and administrative law at Columbia University, called those firings “unprecedented and illegal”. Regarding the Wilcox firing, she said: “The National Labor Relations Act makes clear that president can fire board members only for neglect of duty and malfeasance. NLRB members can’t be fired just because the president doesn’t want them on the board.”
Andrias noted, however, that the supreme court’s conservative supermajority might rule in Trump’s favor on these firings.
Well, yes, there’s that. Trump’s actions are only illegal if the Supreme Court says they’re illegal.
More Likely-To-Be-Ignored Wisdom From Josh Marshall. Likely to be ignored by feckless Democrats:
First, Democrats’ job is to make the case every day what a disaster Trump governance is and ask voters whether they’ve decided yet that they’d like to make a change. In a way any opposition must almost exalt it’s powerlessness. We’d love to stop these horrible things for you, voters. But you have to put us in power to do it. Second, there is the critical but highly compromised avenue of court action. It was blue states that brought the lawsuit which just put the budget freeze under a restraining order. Third, there’s the very limited but crucial moments when Democrats, even in the minority, can force the majority to come to them or simply delay or even stymie action. The debt ceiling, as I’ve been saying, is a key one of those moments.
There’s mounting evidence that even more than we know is being directed by Elon Musk and his private-sector employees, who are now fanned out across the government. He appears to have taken control of the federal payment system which allows his operatives to stop checks to any private individual in the country and/or examine all their personal financial information.
There’s a pretty developed law that you can’t do stuff in the federal government if you’re not an employee of the federal government, or a contractor who is placed under the rules of the federal government. If you do do those things you become a de facto government employee and the law says you come under all sorts of record-keeping and disclosure requirements. Those requirements turn out to be quite important and consequential.
Now to be clear, I don’t expect a federal judge to start smacking Elon Musk around and I don’t expect a sad sack Musk to glumly apologize to the judge and go along his way back to Texas. But in a situation like this, when laws are being broken at such high velocity you’re looking more than anything else to get into court with a live argument. And this is a very live argument. As I noted above, this is fundamentally a battle over public opinion. But critical to a battle over public opinion in an onslaught such as this is slowing things down as much as possible, throwing as much sand in the gears as possible.
This, to me, is common-sense stuff. As one of our commenters mentioned, Democratic AG’s across the country are definitely engaged. Will our legislators and whatever passes for Democratic Party leadership join them?
Which also reminds me: Will Matt Meyer and the powers-that-be do in Delaware what JB Pritzker is doing in Illinois?:
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) said he would block pardoned Capitol insurrectionists from serving in local government positions, citing a state law ordinance, according to a Thursday letter obtained by The Hill.
“The State’s Personnel Code, administered by the Department of Central Management Services (CMS) and by you as its Director, requires the rejection of candidates for State employment who have engaged in infamous or disgraceful conduct (20 ILCS 415/8b.4),” Pritzker wrote to Raven A. DeVaughn, director of the state’s CMS.
“To protect the integrity of our workforce and safety of our State, I hereby direct CMS to apply the State Personnel Code and consider any participation in the January 6 insurrection as infamous and disgraceful conduct that is antithetical to the mission of the State.”
Sounds simple enough. Just do it.
Meyer Tackles Food Insecurity:
The Delaware Council on Farm and Food Policy was reestablished by Gov. Matt Meyer by way of an executive order on Tuesday – the first step in creating a coordinated state effort to assist food insecure communities.
Currently, one in eight Delawareans and one in five children in the state are food insecure – meaning without reliable access to affordable and nutritious food – according to the Food Bank of Delaware.
Under the executive order, the council will develop a multi-agency statewide food access plan focused on address gaps in the system, promote food security and improve the nutrition of residents in the state.
The Delaware Council on Farm and Food Policy will also maintain an inventory of food system resources in the state or with non-state organizations; monitor and propose actions to minimize climate threats, market volatility, disease outbreaks and any other factors that impact food supply chains; and improve food availability in rural and urban communities in the state.
What do you want to talk about?