Tag: TDS

The law isn’t made until first it’s broken

It’s no secret that I detest Donald Trump, but I’ve been trying to move anti-Trump content off of this, my main blog. Today, however, I had things to say that are not bog standard TDS, including, believe it, or not, exonerating him of criming by one of the most outrageous middle-fingers he’s raised to the nation and crediting his crassness with bringing a legal theory from the vapor down to the ground.

There oughta be a law

⁠⁠The administration has recently been running “public service announcements” that tout the president’s achievements. They have the look and feel of campaign ads—but they’ve been paid for with government funds. In fact, one of the “public service announcements” is a repurposed 2024 Trump campaign ad. If Joe Biden had done this in 2024, Republicans would have screamed about it. These ads should be clearly illegal, but alas, they are not.

Those arguing these ads are illegal cannot point to a simple federal statute prohibiting officeholders from running ads designed to influence an election paid for with government money, because there isn’t one.

Elie Honig

There is a legal saying that “the law isn’t made until first it’s broken.” No prior President has been so contemptuous of his oath of office and of behavioral norms that he would run “grand exalted leader demigod” ads at government expense. But Orange Sauron, like honey badger, don’t care. [UPDATE: Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer think it is a crime already without any new law or revision of old law.]

Such norm-shattering has born some fruit in court, too. No prior President was so contemptuous of norms as to fire the heads of agencies created by Congress that were supposed to have some expertise, and continuity, beyond the power-grabbing grasp of a president who prefered lackeys at the heads of agencies. And so, we now have seen vindicated the “Unitary Executive Theory” (put simply, there’s only three branches of the U.S. Government, and Congress doesn’t execute the laws, so agencies are under the head of the Executive branch) that had been floating in theoretical ether for a fairly long time, untested by norm-breakers.

Denying the Faith

[Jack] Smith himself praised GOP witnesses to the 2020 coup plot who helped him build a case against the president. That was an opportunity for congressional Republicans to distinguish their party from its leader, something they’d reeeeeally like to do before voting begins. But they declined, and honestly, I understand why: Some beliefs, like the alleged illegitimacy of Smith’s prosecution, are so central in the modern right-wing catechism that to deny them is to deny the faith itself.⁠⁠

You can’t be a Christian without accepting Christ’s divinity, and you can’t be a Trumpist without believing that Trump’s obvious, overt criminality is some sort of Democratic “hoax.”

Nick Catoggio, Up Schmitt Creek

Tipping her hand

Chief Justice John Roberts has accomplished so much of his agenda that it’s not easy, as he begins his 22nd Supreme Court term, to think of what unfinished business might remain.

Linda Greenhouse, New York Times

One of the things I don’t like about Linda Greenhouse’s Supreme Court commentary is right there under your nose: since when do Justices, even Chief Justices, have “agendas”?

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

What makes Sauron evil is not that he has a ring of power, but that he, like Saruman, has a mind comprised only of metal and gears and is concerned only with domination and his own Ring is inherently constrained by his own hatred and vanity.⁠⁠

Jake Meador. Let him who has ears to hear, hear.

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 no-algorithm social medium.

Retire These Words!

I never, ever want to hear the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” again.

There is no derangement among those of us horrified by Trump. There never was. There was simply honest recognition of a spectacularly dishonest and disgraceful bully who showed his colors from the start, before his first election to the presidency, when he mocked John McCain’s years of confinement and torture as a prisoner of war, when he mused about some gun enthusiast taking a shot at Hillary Clinton … He was as ready then to lay waste to democratic traditions and institutions as he is now. He was the same aspiring autocrat, just with less practice and power.

“Derangement syndrome” itself should go away. It’s a glib, hyperbolic dismissal of substantive concerns. People on the right who repeatedly raised alarms about Biden’s cognition and health were accused of “Biden derangement syndrome,” but beneath the exaggerations and gracelessness in which some of them indulged were rational observations. “Derangement syndrome,” like so much else these days, shuts down meaningful debate, turning it into so much mud slinging.

With Trump, language has been challenging. There was the period of respectful, reflexive disinclination to use “lies” or “lying,” until the growing tower of euphemisms and synonyms toppled under its own absurdity. “Fascist” was a red line that’s now receiving something of a green light.

“Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe President Trump,” Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic about a week ago, later adding: “Reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.”

How I wish I could label that assessment deranged.

Frank Bruni

Often I post things just because they’re interesting. Other times I post things to amplify them because I believe them. This post is one of those times.

I don’t expect ever to need to retract this. I can only hope that some day I can write “… but the American people finally got fed up and drove him from office.”

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher

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 no-algorithm social medium.