“Lawfare” in a nutshell
What the federal courts are facing from the Trump administration is trolling, outright defiance, administration attorneys making representations to the court with the administration refusing to follow through, and in general, a double game:
(1) Trump 2.0 says “The establishment is broken. We need to come in and wreck the place. We need to up-end everything.. We need to start throwing tables. Everything’s got to change. We are an administration unlike any other.”
(2) The legal system responds as if Trump 2.0 is an administration unlike any other.
(3) Trump 2.0 complains that they are being treated differently.
David French on the Advisory Opinions podcast (lightly paraphrased).
I hesitate to distill it further, all the way down to “Trump is a hard case, and hard cases make bad law,” because I want to give fair-minded MAGA people (if any there be) a chance to see why he’s a hard case.
Another alternative is “this administration has forfeited the ‘presumption of regularity’ normally afforded the Executive branch,” but that’s a bit too in-the-weeds and also doesn’t explain the “why” of the forfeiture.
The One Big Beautiful Bill
As regular readers know, I try to keep things upbeat in this newsletter. So let me tell you what I like about The One Big Beautiful Bill that passed the House (barely) several hours ago.
I like the fact that it reflects the degree of seriousness with which Americans now govern themselves.
That’s satisfying. In a democracy, representatives are supposed to vote in accordance with the will of the people. If the people demand the policy equivalent of eating out of garbage cans, Congress should deliver. And it has.
The salient fact about this legislation isn’t that it’s “bad,” although it is, for reasons we’ll get into. Bad legislation isn’t noteworthy. We all expect it.
What’s striking about The One Big Beautiful Bill is that it makes no pretense of trying to grapple seriously with America’s problems, even though it’s the centerpiece of the president’s agenda.
…
House Republicans have given up on trying to improve the country. All they wanted was to pass the class, which they did this morning by a single vote on the House floor. The One Big Beautiful Bill is to legislation what an AI-generated essay is to education.
Meditate on this: When I call it “The One Big Beautiful Bill,” I’m not mocking the president by mimicking his habit of speaking in dopey Trump-ese. I’m using the official name given to the bill by House Republicans. American government has become so self-consciously unserious that it’s now advertising that unseriousness in how it refers to its own policies.
Jeffrey Epstein
Say what you will about notorious sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein, at least he killed Jeffrey Epstein. That was the conclusion of the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice’s inspector general back in 2019, but many Americans—including more than a few in the ranks of the MAGA movement—insisted that some sinister conspiracy, likely connected to powerful Democratic officials, killed Epstein before he could destroy more reputations and implicate others in his sordid deeds. Now, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have weighed in after reviewing the evidence, concluding that Epstein committed suicide. The pair made the declaration in an interview with Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo, and it’s hard to begrudge the handful of MAGA social-media types who reacted with surprise and a sense of betrayal. In fact, as recently as February 7, Bongino was talking up Epstein’s connections to the Clintons on his podcast and declaring, “It’s time to start overturning that rock, and seeing what’s underneath.” Apparently, sometimes when you turn over a rock, all you find is the bottom of a rock.
National Review Weekly email.
I’m shocked that Patel and Bongino passed up an opportunity to stir the pot. Will they be fired now for not following the game plan?
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my rusty legal credentials without thinking it through.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium. I am now exploring Radiopaper.com.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 