DL Open Thread: Monday, April 21, 2025

THE POPE HAS DIED:

Pope Francis has died, the Vatican announced on Monday, ending a groundbreaking pontificate that sought, however haltingly, to reshape the Roman Catholic Church into a more inclusive institution.

As tributes poured in from global leaders offering condolences to the world’s Catholics and praising the pontiff’s commitment to the poor and marginalized, deliberations and machinations to choose a successor to Francis got underway.

The absence of Francis, a humble champion of the poor, creates a vacuum in the leadership of more than one billion Catholics. It also leaves the church’s cardinals with a critical decision: whether to choose a new pope who will follow his welcoming, global approach or to restore the more doctrinaire path of his predecessors.

After early missteps, Francis made considerable strides in addressing the church’s sexual abuse crisis and tackled its murky financial culture. His remarkable global stature early in his pontificate — when liberal leaders around the world likewise emphasized climate change, migrants’ rights and income equality — gave way to a populist period when he sometimes seemed a solitary voice. But he never changed his approach.

Here is how his successor will be chosen:

The next pope will be chosen by the College of Cardinals, the Catholic church’s most senior figures appointed by the pontiff, who will make their way to Rome in the next few days for the conclave. The name comes from the Latin cum clave, meaning “with key”, indicating the closed process of electing a pope.

There are more than 220 cardinals from more than 70 countries, but only about 120 are cardinal electors (those over the age of 80 are excluded). Two-thirds of the cardinal electors have been chosen by Francis in the past 10 years and largely reflect his vision of a more inclusive church.

Someone Else Who May Not Last The Week–Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth:

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.  

Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.

Mr. Hegseth’s brother Phil and Tim Parlatore, who continues to serve as his personal lawyer, both have jobs in the Pentagon, but it is not clear why either would need to know about upcoming military strikes aimed at the Houthis in Yemen.

The Knives Are Out.  From the guy who was Hegseth’s spokesman:

It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon. From leaks of sensitive operational plans to mass firings, the dysfunction is now a major distraction for the president — who deserves better from his senior leadership.

President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account. Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.

The latest flashpoint is a near collapse inside the Pentagon’s top ranks. On Friday, Hegseth fired three of his most loyal senior staffers — senior adviser Dan Caldwell, deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to the deputy secretary of Defense. In the aftermath, Defense Department officials working for Hegseth tried to smear the aides anonymously to reporters, claiming they were fired for leaking sensitive information as part of an investigation ordered earlier this month.

Yet none of this is true. While the department said that it would conduct polygraph tests as part of the probe, not one of the three has been given a lie detector test. In fact, at least one of them has told former colleagues that investigators advised him he was about to be cleared officially of any wrongdoing. Unfortunately, Hegseth’s team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door.

Remember, kids, the person writing this was, up until recently, Hegseth’s chosen Pentagon spokesperson.  And a Trump loyalist.

Alito’s Dissent:  ‘Where’s The Urgency?’:

In a five-page dissent distributed to reporters at 11:21 p.m. on Saturday, Alito (joined by Thomas) echoed many of the Trump administration’s complaints about his colleagues’ decision to grant temporary relief to the detainees. He lamented that, “literally in the middle of the night,” the Supreme Court had “issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours or receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order.”

He had declined to join that order, he explained, “because we had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate.”

Alito added that both the executive and judicial branches “have an obligation to follow the law.” And in particular, he noted, the executive branch “must proceed under the terms of” the court’s April 7 order, requiring it to provide detainees with notice of their removal and an opportunity to challenge it, “and this Court should follow established procedures.”

Maybe it’s just me, but the fact that Trump and his goons were scurrying to get these people on planes and out of the country as soon as possible justified an emergency order to stop disappearing people.

What do you want to talk about?