Category: Fuck This Bullshit

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The End Of Law

Robert Reich February 10th. The Trump regime is refusing to be bound by the federal courts. Where will this end?

Friends, He is the most lawless president in American history. He's allowed Musk's rats unfettered access to the Treasury's payments system. Banned birthright citizenship. Refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Closed independent agencies without Congress's approval. Substituted political loyalists for civil servants. Unleashed the military on civilians. And on it goes.

Republican lawmakers won't restrain him. In one of the most shameful apologia for dictatorship I've ever heard coming from a public official, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina admits that much of what Trump is doing "runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense." But, Tillis adds, "nobody should bellyache about that."

We shouldn't bellyache about Trump's torching the Constitution?

As Trump's marauding continues, America's last defense is the federal courts. But the big story here (which hasn't received nearly the attention it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts.

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance declared that "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power."

This is bonkers. In our system of government, it's up to the courts to determine whether the president is using his power "legitimately," not the president.

Consider Trump's freeze on all federal spending. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to appropriate money, not the president.

So far, two federal judges have stopped Trump's freeze, pending full hearings on the lawsuits. But Trump is ignoring these court decisions and continues to freeze funds Congress has appropriated, notwithstanding.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, says the freeze will continue even though Trump's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has withdrawn the memo implementing it — an Orwellian move that last week prompted U.S. District Judge AliKhan to reprimand the OMB.

"It appears that OMB sought to overcome a judicially imposed obstacle without actually ceasing the challenged conduct. The court can think of few things more disingenuous."

On Saturday, federal district court Judge Paul A. Engelmayer temporarily denied Musk's young recruits access to the Treasury's payment and data systems, finding a risk of "irreparable harm." The judge ordered anyone who had been granted access to the systems since January 20 to "destroy any and all copies of material downloaded" from it.

Well, good luck with that. How will Engelmayer know all copies have been destroyed in an administration that denies judges have the power to control what the president does?

Worse yet, Musk's gang have access to the computer code. How will the judge prevent them from changing that code?

Another federal judge, John Coughenour, has blocked Trump's executive order altering birthright citizenship, calling it "clearly unconstitutional." The judge didn't pull any punches:

"It has become ever more apparent that, to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals. The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain."

Exactly. But how can Judge Coughenour guarantee that the Trump regime will grant citizenship to all children born in the United States to undocumented parents? Trump and Musk have tunneled into the entire federal government, even including the passport office (When transgender people try to renew, new passports list their sex at birth.)

Federal judges considering the legality of Trump's mass deportations are bound by Supreme Court rulings that noncitizens have a right to due process before being deported — including the right to be informed of the charges against them, the right to an attorney, and the right to present evidence in their defense.

Here, too, Trump's regime has ignored these rulings.

Meanwhile, in a lawsuit filed Friday, several "sanctuary" cities and counties are challenging both Trump's executive order withdrawing federal funds from places that refuse to help carry out his immigration agenda and his Justice Department's threat to prosecute any jurisdiction that refuses to comply.

Plaintiffs are seeking to "check this abuse of power" by asking the courts to declare the Trump regime's actions unlawful and prevent their enforcement.

The law is clearly on the plaintiff's side. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the federal government cannot force cities and states to adopt laws or to enforce federal mandates.

But Trump isn't budging.

Over the next months, these and dozens of other federal cases will be appealed to the Supreme Court — either by the plaintiffs arguing that Trump is ignoring lower-court decisions, or by Trump's Justice Department appealing those decisions.

Then what?

You have every reason to be cynical about the current majority on the Supreme Court. But the cases I've just cited, along with many others, are based on the Supreme Court's own precedents that say that Trump cannot legally do what he's doing.

Yes, the Roberts court has shown itself willing to reverse its prior opinions (see: Roe v. Wade), but my betting is that at least on some of these issues the high court will rule against Trump.

All of which raises a final, perilous question: What if the Trump regime ignores the Supreme Court just as it has ignored lower courts?

In his 2024 year-end report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice John Roberts anticipated this possibility, noting that judicial independence "is undermined unless the other branches [of government] are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court's decrees."

Roberts mentioned defiance by southern governors of the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Their defiance required that federal troops enforce the Supreme Court's decision.

Roberts then commented on more recent defiance:

"Within the past few years … elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.

There's no secret whom Roberts was referring to. His first initials are JD and he ought to know better. Vance graduated Yale Law School Class of 2013, and his wife, Usha, clerked for Roberts from 2017 to 2018.

Yet Vance said on a 2021 podcast, "When the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'"

Here's Vance in a February 2024 interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos: Vance: "The president has to be able to run the government as he thinks he should. That's the way the Constitution works. It has been thwarted too much by the way our bureaucracy has worked over the past 15 years."

Stephanopoulos: "The Constitution also says the president must abide by legitimate Supreme Court rulings, doesn't it?"

Vance: "The Constitution says that the Supreme Court can make rulings, but if the Supreme Court — and, look, I hope that they would not do this — but if the Supreme Court said the president of the United States can't fire a general, that would be an illegitimate ruling, and the president has to have Article II prerogative under the Constitution to actually run the military as he sees fit."

In other words, if the Supreme Court rules against Trump on an important issue, there's a fair chance the Trump-Vance-Musk regime will thumb their nose at it.

What then? Impeachment isn't a possibility because Republicans run both chambers of Congress and haven't exactly distinguished themselves with integrity or independence.

If Trump simply ignores the high court, is that the end of law?

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© 2025 Robert Reich

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When you kill a healthcare ceo, it's terrorism. When someone shoots your kid in elementary school, it's thoughts and prayers for like a week and then they move on. It truly shows the fact that terrorism is whatever the American government wants it to mean.

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Change My Mind

Apparently in New York state, if you voice any kind of support for Luigi you're placed on a watch list. Bring it, bitches!

Are you on that list yet?

JUST IN: 

Criminal defense attorney and former Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Mark Bederow believes that prosecutors in the Luigi Mangione case have already made a significant "mistake."

In an editorial published by the New York Times, Bederow argues that adding terrorism-related charges to the Mangione prosecution was a significant error that could jeopardize what should have been a straightforward murder conviction in the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

"By complicating a simple case, [Manhattan District Attorney Alvin] Bragg has increased the risk of acquittal on the most serious charge and a hung jury on any charge," he argues. "Since Mr. Mangione is already being celebrated by some as a folk hero because of his rage against the American health care system, the terrorism charge, which alleges that Mr. Mangione 'intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policies of a unit of government' and 'affect the conduct of a unit of government,' almost certainly will turn the case into political theater."

Convicting Mangione on terrorism-related charges is already difficult enough given precedents set by New York appellate courts, writes Bederow, who then argues that there is already evidence that could exonerate the alleged CEO killer from this particular charge.

"The evidence appears to suggest that Mr. Mangione was bent on assassinating Mr. Thompson rather than intending 'to sow terror,' as Mr. Bragg alleged in his news conference unsealing Mr. Mangione's indictment," he writes. "Mr. Mangione's notebook reportedly says that he planned a targeted assassination because he did not want to 'risk innocents.' So while this statement incriminates Mr. Mangione as a murderer, it appears to undermine the terrorism charge."

Added to this, Bederow believes that forcing jurors to focus on Mangione's objections to the American health care system could make them more sympathetic than they would have otherwise been.

"By turning Mr. Mangione's supposed intent into a central element of the trial they invite juror nullification, in which jurors ignore their instructions to focus on the facts and instead let their points of view influence their verdict, leading to a hung jury, if not a full acquittal," he warns.

[source]

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He Cannot Get Anywhere NEAR The White House

Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and '40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump's description of his opponents as "radical-left thugs" who "live like vermin."This language isn't merely ugly or repellant: These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often. In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped "cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People." In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: "Jews are lice: they cause typhus." Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as "the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood."Stalin used the same kind of language at about the same time. He called his opponents the "enemies of the people," implying that they were not citizens and that they enjoyed no rights. He portrayed them as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be "subjected to ongoing purification," and he inspired his fellow communists to employ similar rhetoric. In my files, I have the notes from a 1955 meeting of the leaders of the Stasi, the East German secret police, during which one of them called for a struggle against "vermin activities" (there is, inevitably, a German word for this: Schädlingstätigkeiten), by which he meant the purge and arrest of the regime's critics. In this same era, the Stasi forcibly moved suspicious people away from the border with West Germany, a project nicknamed "Operation Vermin."This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as "poisonous weeds." Pol Pot spoke of "cleansing" hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be "purified."In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren't human. If they are vermin, they don't get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won't be held accountable.Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace's notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for "segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." But he did not speak of his political opponents as "vermin" or talk about them poisoning the nation's blood. Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of "alien enemies" but not parasites.In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, "They're poisoning the blood of our country" and "They're destroying the blood of our country." He has claimed that many have "bad genes." He has also been more explicit: "They're not humans; they're animals"; they are "cold-blooded killers." He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as "the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics." Not only do they have no rights; they should be "handled by," he has said, "if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military."In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. "I haven't read Mein Kampf," he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler's manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. "If you don't use certain rhetoric," he told an interviewer, "if you don't use certain words, and maybe they're not very nice words, nothing will happen."His talk of mass deportation is equally calculating. When he suggests that he would target both legal and illegal immigrants, or use the military arbitrarily against U.S. citizens, he does so knowing that past dictatorships have used public displays of violence to build popular support. By calling for mass violence, he hints at his admiration for these dictatorships but also demonstrates disdain for the rule of law and prepares his followers to accept the idea that his regime could, like its predecessors, break the law with impunity.These are not jokes, and Trump is not laughing. Nor are the people around him. Delegates at the Republican National Convention held up prefabricated signs: Mass Deportation Now. Just this week, when Trump was swaying to music at a surreal rally, he did so in front of a huge slogan: Trump Was Right About Everything. This is language borrowed directly from Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist. Soon after the rally, the scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat posted a photograph of a building in Mussolini's Italy displaying his slogan: Mussolini Is Always Right.These phrases have not been put on posters and banners at random in the final weeks of an American election season. With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the "bloodbath" that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn't win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.