DL Open Thread: Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Courts To Trump: Pretty Much Everything You’re Doing Is Illegal.  Transgender Troops Ban.  Dismantling Of USAID.  Trump Rope-A-Dope On Deportations.

We’ve learned that Democrats aren’t coming to the rescue, the courts are all we have left.

Trump And Putin Still Can’t Agree On What They Get To Rip Off From Ukraine:

A “no” is not a “yes” when it is a “maybe,” a “probably not,” or an “only if.”

This is the painfully predictable lesson the Trump administration’s first real foray into wartime diplomacy with the Kremlin has dealt. They’ve been hopelessly bluffed.

They asked for a 30-day, frontline-wide ceasefire, without conditions. On Tuesday, they got – after a theatrical week-long wait and hundreds more lives lost – a relatively small prisoner swap, hockey matches, more talks, and – per the Kremlin readout – a month-long mutual pause on attacks against “energy infrastructure.”

This last phrase is where an easily avoidable technical minefield begins. Per US President Donald Trump’s post and that of his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, the agreement concerned “energy and infrastructure.” These are two entirely different sets of ideas.

Russia says it will not attack Ukraine’s electricity grids and gas supplies, as it has mercilessly over the past years, to the extent that Ukraine’s winters have always been a dicey dance with icy families and reserve power sources. The White House, confusingly – in a disagreement, typo or translation nuance – has extended this truce to potentially every part of Ukraine that is considered infrastructure: bridges, perhaps key roads, or ports, or railways. It has created conditions that are almost impossible for Russia’s relentless pace of air assaults – which resumed, as they do every night, on Tuesday night – to adhere to.

Trump can’t out-bluff Putin.  Putin’s gonna take him (and Ukraine) to the cleaners.

The Sham Of Trump’s IRS Firings:

On Feb. 20, nearly 7,000 probationary employees at the Internal Revenue Service began receiving an unsigned letter telling them that they had been fired for poor performance.

Trump administration lawyers insist that the IRS and other federal agencies have acted within their authority when they ordered waves of mass terminations since Trump took office. But according to previously unreported emails obtained by ProPublica, a top lawyer at the IRS warned administration officials that the performance-related language in his agency’s termination letter was “a false statement” that amounted to “fraud” if the agency kept the language in the letter.

Michelle Bercovici, a lawyer who represents federal workers, told ProPublica that Rillotta’s ignored warnings should make it easier for plaintiffs to show that the mass firings were “arbitrary and capricious,” the legal standard needed to invalidate a federal agency’s action. She added that the emails could also help plaintiffs recover attorneys’ fees from the government.

“When an agency acts based on false information, not only does it set the action up for being overturned,” she said. “It also means the agency is not going to have many defenses to its actions and could be liable for fees.”

Multiple federal lawsuits are now challenging the Trump administration’s mass firings. Last week, two federal judges temporarily blocked the IRS and other firings, but the lawsuits continue.

The issue of whether the performance rationale was legitimate has been central to the suits. One suit, brought by a group of labor unions, advocacy groups and other parties in California federal court, alleges that OPM directed the probationary firings and so “perpetrated one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country, telling tens of thousands of workers that they are being fired for performance reasons, when they most certainly were not.”

Trump’s Allies Going After Progressive Political Infrastructure:

Executive actions intended to cripple top Democratic law firms. Investigations of Democratic fund-raising and organizing platforms. Ominous suggestions that nonprofits aligned with Democrats or critical of President Trump should have their tax exemptions revoked.

Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.

A small group of White House officials has been working to identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem, taking stock of previous efforts to investigate them, according to two people familiar with the group’s work who requested anonymity to describe it.

Scott Walter, president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which monitors liberal money in politics, recently briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques. The White House group is said to be exploring what more can be done within the law.

It is not unusual for partisans in Congress or their outside allies to push for investigations into political groups on the other side of the aisle.

But using the levers of government to target the opposition has long been considered an abuse of power, sometimes leading to prosecution. Mr. Trump himself was impeached in 2019 for pressuring the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens.

Anyone think that Chuck Schumer will try to stop this?

I close with this post from an already-banned commenter:

“I like the restrained comment “Delaware’s Worst Governor Ever, John Carney” but would like to see or be referred to articles that say why.”

Yo, ‘Biker D’, put Carney’s name in our search engine and see all the articles anyone would ever need to reach this conclusion.  Or, in your case, get someone to read them to you.

What do you want to talk about?