Where is our nation headed?

I posted this image and text this morning to BlueSky, Meta, and TwittX:

THIS is likely where we’re headed, given that the Article I Branch is now in hospice care with a DNR.

That photo jibe is a knock-off from a WWII fascist quote aimed at the Pope. Hyperbolic today?

 

Consider, from Joyce Vance's new book, just released.

 

to wit,

...Judicial review positions the Court, arguably the weakest of the three branches of government, to determine when one of the other branches exceeds the scope of its constitutional authority and to countermand the unconstitutional act. 

Marbury v. Madison establishes the principle of judicial review, which allows courts to assess laws passed by Congress for constitutionality. The contours of judicial review are not laid out in the Constitution, but Chief Justice Marshall understood that if the new nation were to have a functional rule of law, the Supreme Court had to have both the authority to deem laws unconstitutional and to overrule them so they could not stay in effect in violation of the Constitution. 

But what about unconstitutional acts by a president? [emphasis mine] That part of the equation was explicitly confirmed by the Court in a case heard a century and a half later. By then, plenty of case law already pointed to this obvious conclusion, but the Court made plain: Even a president can’t bypass the courts and ignore judges’ decisions. In Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, decided in 1952, the Supreme Court refused to let President Harry Truman take over US steel mills during the Korean War. Though Truman didn’t like the decision, he complied. That’s how the rule of law works. 

By December 1951, trouble was brewing in the nation’s steel mills. There was a dispute with organized labor over wages and working conditions. But the United States had been at war in Korea for more than a year, and China had also entered the fray. Then, negotiations with the United Steelworkers of America, a powerful union, failed. The union filed notice that it would strike at the end of the month when existing agreements with employers expired. Federal mediation with the union was tried and failed. Truman sent the case to the Federal Wage Stabilization Board in an effort to avoid a major disruption of material in such a delicate moment. That failed as well, and the union gave notice that a nationwide strike would commence on April 9, 1952. 

The Court explained what President Truman did next in its opinion: “The indispensability of steel as a component of substantially all weapons and other war materials led the President to believe that the proposed work stoppage would immediately jeopardize our national defense and that governmental seizure of the steel mills was necessary in order to assure the continued availability of steel. Reciting these considerations for his action, the President, a few hours before the strike was to begin, issued Executive Order 10340…. The order directed the Secretary of Commerce to take possession of most of the steel mills and keep them running.” The issue before the Court was whether a president had the power to take this action via executive order. 

The steel companies tried to fight off the executive order in court, arguing that the president lacked the power to make the seizures because neither the Constitution nor an act of Congress granted it to him. On April 30, 1952, the district court ruled in their favor and enjoined the government’s seizure. The court of appeals weighed in the same day, but it came to the opposite conclusion. It stayed the district court’s injunction, which meant the president could move forward. In a display of the speed with which the Supreme Court can act when motivated, it granted certiorari, agreeing to hear the case on May 3, and set it for oral argument on May 12. 

Plenty of case law from the intervening 149 years since Marbury pointed toward the conclusion the Supreme Court reached in Youngstown, but its decision settled the matter once and for all…

Vance, Joyce. Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy (pp. 24-26). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

 Will Donald Trump simply scoff? He scoffs crudely at everything else these days

 

 Joyce's Substack (I subscribe).

 

Click here.

Below, another worthy read.

 

 

 

 

BACK TO JOYCE

 

Cutting to the chase.

 

 

UPDATE

 

From Rick Wilson's Substack.

[Steve] Bannon is road-testing a narrative that treats the Constitution as negotiable, the law as elastic, and power as a permanent condition of the right people in the right offices. He’s not coy about it either. Asked how they’d get around the pesky “no third term” rule, he purred that there are “many different alternatives,” and that, at the “appropriate time,” he’d unveil the plan.

Translation: they’re workshopping pathways to normalize the unthinkable and daring the rest of us to stop them.

This is how authoritarians advance: by saying the quiet part out loud until it isn’t quiet anymore. They float the balloon, smirk while you sputter, then call your protest hysteria. The goal isn’t persuasion; it’s habituation. Bannon’s prediction isn’t a legal argument; it’s a loyalty oath: accept that Trump is destiny, that elections are a formality, and that rules are for the weak.

'eh?

Follow-up on "The First Buddy"

I finished Faiz's excellent, disturbing book on Elon Musk. Supremely curious in this time of hyper-aggressive Trumpian mass deportations is the following:

 

 

Below, the original WaPo lengthy reporting headline. I seriously doubt that they'd libel the wealthiest man on the planet.

 

Given that Elon and his DOGE bros have gained more than 3 months of pretty much unmonitored access to large swaths of federal data across a breadth of agencies, one would hardly be surprised to learn that his fake U.S. "student visa" details have by now conveniently hit "the bit bucket."

PALO ALTO, Calif. [WaPo, Updated October 27, 2024]— Long before he became one of Donald Trump’s biggest donors and campaign surrogates, South African-born Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Musk in recent months has amplified the Republican presidential candidate’s claims that “open borders” and undocumented immigrants are destroying America, broadcasting those views to more than 200 million followers on the site formerly known as Twitter, which Musk bought in 2022 and later renamed X.

What Musk has not publicly disclosed is that he did not have the legal right to work while building the company that became Zip2, which sold for about $300 million in 1999. It was Musk’s steppingstone to Tesla and the other ventures that have made him the world’s wealthiest person — and arguably America’s most successful immigrant.

Musk and his brother, Kimbal, have often described their immigrant journey in romantic terms, as a time of personal austerity, undeterred ambition and a willingness to flout conventions. Musk arrived in Palo Alto in 1995 for a graduate degree program at Stanford University but never enrolled in courses, working instead on his start-up.

Leaving school left Musk without a legal basis to remain in the United States, according to legal experts... 

The Dystopian Duo of Donald "I-Now-Run-The-World" Trump and Elon "Alexander-the-Great-Reincarnate" Musk are nothing less than The WWE Bruise Brothers of democracy. Minimally.

 

They both regard themselves as Visionary Geniuses, irascibly tolerating the rest of us and our outdated, ineffective socioeconomic norms.

___

 

While I really like Hubris Maximus and recommend it without reservation (acutely timely), I confess to being a bit perplexed and disappointed by the author's failing to cite Kara Swisher.

 

to wit:

The world’s richest man and most famous living tech entrepreneur had to be fucking kidding. But Elon Musk was not joking when he emailed me on October 17, 2022, with the subject line: “You’re an asshole.”

Just a week earlier, Musk had been friendly toward me, as was typical. In fact, he’d asked me for my thoughts about Twitter, the beleaguered service he was forced to buy after pretending that an ironclad contract was not made of iron. And despite engaging in the business equivalent of a toddler tantrum after agreeing to overpay for the company without contingencies, Musk had won the prize. Well, to be more accurate, the booby prize. While hugely popular and addictive to politicians, the media, and promiscuous id-brains like Musk, Twitter had long been the little tech engine that couldn’t.

What was so weird about Musk labeling me “an asshole” was that—unlike many critics—I had taken a fair wait-and-see attitude about his purchase of Twitter. I had covered many deals that had some element of bullshit introduced in the midst of the battle, such as Microsoft’s failed attempt to buy Yahoo, and this seemed no different. Musk filed a lawsuit in Delaware’s Court of Chancery to challenge the deal he’d agreed to, but just before his deposition, he balked. In the end, Musk had to fork over $44 billion for Twitter and no amount of rage tweeting was going to change that.

So, it’s true: I welcomed Musk’s takeover. I’d covered Twitter since it debuted in 2006, and for most of its history it had been a woefully underperforming business. A lot of the blame for this falls on the bony shoulders of cofounder Jack Dorsey. At the time of Musk’s offer, Dorsey was a part-time CEO whose attention was divided by his work at the innovative payments company Square (later called Block). A genuine visionary, Dorsey had started to foist his personal habits on his employees, like opening a company meeting with a community meditation. He also decided that he was so smart he could run two companies at once. Narrator: He could not run two companies at once.

While heads nodded publicly about how amazing he was to pull it off, privately most people decried his tone-deaf arrogance to me. I agreed. Typically, one or both businesses suffered, and only tech CEOs of a certain type considered themselves so important as to be irreplaceable. But, as my grandmother correctly noted, the graveyards are full of once-busy people.

And whistling past the cemetery is where Twitter always seemed to be, barely making it as a business, with its stock mainly hovering around its IPO offering. Still, it had created a splash well beyond its small size. Despite a tiny $5 billion in annual revenue, Twitter’s influence was often compared to Meta’s, which pulled in $116 billion in 2022. Twitter dominated the zeitgeist, populated by a coterie of celebrities, politicians, and media heavyweights all vying to be the dunk master of the platform. That title, eventually, went hands down to @realDonaldTrump, who used Twitter as a megaphone to become the world’s biggest troll.

But the real story of Twitter was not in the noisy heat it generated, but in colder and harder math. The premise of Twitter was dead simple: A registered user logs in via the Internet or a mobile phone and answers the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or fewer. It was immediately clear when I signed on in 2007 that its lightweight design and newsy bent would soon make it the buzziest product in Silicon Valley. It was also the glitchiest. Its revenue, user growth, and most important of all, stock price all remained in the doldrums. The basic product remained stuck, too. Early Twitter looked an awful lot like current Twitter, where doubling the number of allowed characters counted as innovation. These drags combined with a persistent drama among its founders meant the company never realized its potential. Actually, it was a minor miracle that the bird stayed aloft. While Twitter had received acquisition interest over the years, negotiations always ended in tears once potential buyers realized the company was a hot mess from both a tech and product perspective...

Swisher, Kara. Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (Ch 13, pp. 215-217). (Function). Kindle Edition

I began citing Faiz's book on Elon a couple of posts ago.

 

Lots more shortly. Stay tuned.

 

MAYDAY UPDATE

 

Too much going on. Elon Musk-Donald Trump summary: They each regard themselves as Existential Visionary Genius Leaders exempt from any sort of frictional process norms that bind us lesser mortals (up to and inclusive of law).

Per Elon et al:

Recall "Effective Altruism," anyone?

100 days of malignant delusions

Click here.

  

Recall how Trump promised unequivocally to end Russia's war against Urkaine within 24 hours of his inauguration. Hour 2,400 has arrived. Peace between Ukraine and Russia has not as of this posting.

An Open Letter Opposing White House Retaliatory Investigations

"We write with grave concern about the two presidential memoranda dated April 9, 2025, targeting Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, respectively — two former national security officials,who served the people of the United States. These executive actions represent a dangerous escalation in the abuse of presidential power: weaponizing federal agencies to carry out personalized retribution against named individuals.

Presidents of both parties have long respected the independence of federal law enforcement and refrained from using the power at their disposal to punish perceived enemies. Indeed, presidents have gone out of their way to avoid even the appearance of impropriety or influence. President Trump’s statements are a profoundly unconstitutional break with this tradition. He is explicitly targeting two Americans because they exercised their First Amendment rights and criticized him. That is a miscarriage of justice which these individuals, and other people and institutions vindictively singled out by him, will be unfairly forced to endure. The president of the United States must not direct federal authorities to investigate people with whom he disagrees.

This is not democratic governance. It is baseless retaliation—and it has no place in the United States of America. Across our history, there have been dark chapters where state power has been weaponized and dissent suppressed, including the crackdown during and after World War I, the Red Scare of the 1950s, and President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.” These episodes are now seen as shameful deviations from the fundamental American principles of free expression and impartial justice. The April 9 presidential memoranda are an appalling rejection of those bedrock democratic values.

Indeed, the President’s actions not only evoke some of the worst moments in our history; they go even further. For a president to personally and publicly direct the levers of the federal government against publicly named citizens for political reasons sets a new and perilous precedent in our republic. It brings to mind the abuses of power that characterize authoritarian nations, not the United States. No matter one’s party or politics, every American should reject the notion that the awesome power of the presidency can be used to pursue individual vendettas. Behavior of this kind is more to be expected from a royal despot than the elected leader of a constitutional republic. This is the path of autocracy, not democracy.

For these reasons, we urge that the President immediately rescind these memoranda and that agency heads repudiate any order that undermines their oaths, politicizes their missions, or betrays the constitutional principles they are sworn to uphold.

These actions, if carried out, will leave a permanent stain on our institutions and erode our democracy. History will not forget who stood silent. We will not stand silent."

List of Signatories:

Amb. Norman Eisen (ret.), Executive Chair, State Democracy Defenders Fund
Christine Todd Whitman, Governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001 (R); Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the George W. Bush Administration from 2001 to 2003
Jeffrey Amestoy, Chief Justice (ret.) Vermont
Caroline Anderson
Alex Aronson
Les AuCoin, Representative of the 1st Congressional District of Oregon from 1975 to 1993 (D)
Chiraag Bains, Former Deputy Assistant to the President, Domestic Policy Council
Brian Baird, Representative of the 3rd Congressional District of Washington from 1999 to 2011 (D)
Marge Baker
Daniel Barkhuff, MD
Lavora Barnes
Ian Bassin, Executive Director and Co-Founder, Protect Democracy
Joseph Bean
Paul E. Begala, Counselor to the President from 1997 to 1999
Mark Begich, U.S. Senator for the State of Alaska from 2009 to 2015 (D)
Michael L. Belitzky, Alliance for American Leadership
Nate Bell, Representative of the 20th Arkansas House District from 2013 to 2017 (I)
John B. Bellinger III, Former Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Legal Adviser to the National Security Council
Matt Bennett, Co-Founder, Third Way
James Blanchard, Governor of Michigan from 1983 to 1991, Representative of the 18th Congressional District of Michigan from 1975 to 1983 (D)
Sidney Blumenthal
Reverend Glynden Bode
Roger Bolton, Formal Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administration Official
John Bonifaz, President, Free Speech For People
Kathy Boockvar, President, Athena Strategies; Former Pennsylvania Secretary of State
Noah Bookbinder, President, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Spencer P. Boyer, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy
Barbara Boxer, U.S. Senator for the State of California from 1993 to 2017 (D)
Shellie Bressler, Senior Professional Staff Member for Global Health, Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 2007 to 2013; House Foreign Affairs Committee from 2015 to 2019
William Brodhead, Representative of the 17th Congressional District of Michigan from 1975 to 1983 (D)
Rosa Brooks, Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law, Georgetown University; Former Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense
Steve Bullock, Former Governor of Montana (D)
Steve Bunnell, Former General Counsel, U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Lucy Caldwell, Political Strategist
Arne Carlson, Former Governor of Minnesota (R)
Davy Carter
Rod Chandler, Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Washington from 1983 to  1993 (R)
Linda Chavez
Jeff Chester, Executive Director, Center for Digital Democracy
Ty Cobb, Special Counsel to the President in the Trump Administration from 2017 to 2018; Former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland from 1981 to 1986
Barbara Comstock, Representative of the 10th Congressional District of Virginia from 2015 to 2019 (R)
George Conway, Board President, Society for the Rule of Law
Sam Coppersmith, Representative of the 1st Congressional District of Arizona from 1993 to 1995 (D)
Susan Corke, Executive Director, State Democracy Defenders Fund
Geoffrey Cowan
Eugene Craig III, Former Vice-Chair, Maryland Republican Party
Tom Daschle, Senator from South Dakota from 1987-2005 (D), Senate Majority and Minority Leader
Glyn Davies, U.S. Ambassador (ret.)
Mark de la Iglesia
Charles W. Dent, Representative of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 2005 to 2018 (R)
Laura Dickinson, Lyle T. Alverson Professor of Law, The George Washington University
Murray Dickman, Primary Assistant to U.S. Attorney General from 1988 to 1991
Renee DiResta
Charles K. Djou, Representative of the 1st Congressional District of Hawaii from 2010 to 2011 (R)
Donna F. Edwards, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of Maryland from 2008 to 2017 (D)
Mickey Edwards, Representative of the 5th Congressional District of Oklahoma from 1977 to 1993 (R)
Marc Elias
Uriel Epshtein
Janice Feather
Praveen Fernandes, Vice President, Constitutional Accountability Center
Claire Finkelstein, Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
Don Fox, Former General Counsel and Acting Director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics
Emil H. Frankel, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, 2002-2005
Hannah Fried, Executive Director, All Voting is Local
Brian Frosh, Former Attorney General of Maryland
Mark Gallagher
Hon. Tim Gallaudet, Ph.D., Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (ret.)
David Gee
Jennifer Gee, Elder, Presbyterian Church (USA)
Richard Gephardt, Former Democratic Leader, U.S. House of Representatives
Stuart Gerson
Hon. Nancy Gertner (ret.)
Lisa Gilbert, Co-President, Public Citizen
John Giruado, Attorney Advisor, Office of Legal Counsel, Associate Deputy Secretary in the Reagan Administration
Michelle Glogovac, Founder & CEO, The MLG Collective®, Podcast Publicist & Author
Jerry Goldfeder, Director of Fordham Law School Voting Rights & Democracy Project
Brianne J. Gorod, Chief Counsel, Constitutional Accountability Center
Hon. Joshua Gotman, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense & Treasury
James Greenwood
Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO, Fair Fight Action
Ânne Gruner
Vanita Gupta, Former U.S. Department of Justice Official
Bill Hafker
Kathleen Hamill, Attorney
Kenneth Harbaugh, President, VALOR Media Network
Mark Harvey, Former Special Assistant to the President, National Security Council Staff
Jeff Hauser, Executive Director, Revolving Door Project
Michael Hayden, Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
Jeremy M. Helfgot, Principal, J.M. Helfgot Communications; Co-founder, West Coast Women Forward; Co founder, Blazing Desert Indivisible
Paul Hodes, Representative of the 2nd Congressional District of New Hampshire from 2007 to 2011 (D)
Joe Hoeffel, Representative of the 13th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2005 (D)
Kate Helfrich
Jerry Huckaby, Representative of the 5th District of Louisiana from 1977 to 1993 (D)
Daniel Hunter, Choose Democracy
Joe Hunter, Former Congressional Chief of Staff
Bob Inglis, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of South Carolina from 1993 to 1999 and again from 2005 to 2011 (R)
Steve Israel, Representative of the 2nd and 3rd Congressional Districts of New York from 2001 to 2013 and 2013 to 2017 (D)
David Jolly, Representative of the 13th Congressional District of Florida from 2014 to 2017 (R)
Virginia Kase Solomón, President & CEO, Common Cause
Gary Kasparov
Peter Keisler, Acting Attorney General in the George W. Bush Administration in 2007
James Kelly, Deputy Assistant Secretary, International Trade Administration, 1984-1988
Bob Kerrey, Governor of Nebraska from 1983 to 1987 and Senator from 1989 to 2001 (D)
John Kingston, Former U.S. Senate Candidate; Candidate and Coalitions Chair, Forward Party
Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum
Peter H. Kostmayer, Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 1977 to 1981 and 1983 to 1993 (D)
William Kristol, Chief of Staff to the Vice President in the George H.W. Bush Administration from 1989 to 1993
James R. Kunder, Former Deputy Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development
Philip Lacovara, Counsel to the Special Prosecutor, Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office in the Nixon Administration from 1973 to 1974
Leonard Lance
David Lapan, Former Spokesman for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security
John LeBoutiller, Representative of the 6th Congressional District of New York from 1981 to 1983 (R)
James M. LeMunyon, Member, Virginia House of Delegates, 2010-2018
Marty Linsky, Former Assistant Republican Floor Leader, Massachusetts House of Representatives
Harry Litman, Former U.S. Attorney and Deputy Assistant Attorney General
Mike Lofgren
Sheree Lopez
Linda Lorelle, Co-Founder, Civil Dialogues
Charles D. Luckey
Sally Lyall
Joanna Lydgate, CEO, States United
R.J. Lyman, Citizen of the United States and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Mairin Macaluso, Senior Advisor, Leadership Now Project
Tom Malinowski, Representative of the 7th Congressional District of New Jersey from 2019 to 2023 (D)
Debrianna Mansini, Activist
Marjorie Margolies, Representative of the 13th Congressional District of Pennsylvania from 1993 to 1995 (D)
Rabbi Bonnie Margulis
Andrew G. McCabe, Former Deputy Director, FBIMary B. McCord, Former Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security
John McCormick
Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, CEO, RepresentUs
Lt. Col. Amy McGrath, United States Marine Corps (ret.)
John McKay, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington appointed by George W. Bush from 2001 to 2007
Brian P. McKeon, Former Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources
Hon. Donna McLean
Barbara McQuade, United States Attorney, Eastern District of Michigan, 2010-2017
John M. Mitnick, Former Associate Counsel to the President
Jeff Modisett, Former Indiana Attorney General; Former Assistant U.S. Attorney
Toby Moffett, Representative of the 6th Congressional District of Connecticut from 1975 to 1983 (D)
Larry Moore, Substack Creator, Democracy Forge
Mike Moore, Former Attorney General of Mississippi
Alberto Mora, Former General Counsel, Department of the Navy
Seth Moulton, Representative of the 6th Congressional District of Massachusetts from 2015 to present (D)
Virginia A. Mulberger, Former National Security Council Senior Director and Special Assistant to President George H. W. Bush
Tiffany Muller, President, End Citizens United
Lissa Muscatine, Presidential Speechwriter, Clinton Administration; Director of Speechwriting for the Secretary of State, Obama Administration
Elizabeth Neumann, Former DHS Assistant Secretary of Counterterrorism
Mario Nicolais, General Counsel, The Lincoln Project
Cheryl Niro, Past President, Illinois State Bar Association
Joseph Nye, Former Assistant Secretary of Defense
Sean O'Keefe, Professor, Syracuse University
Ted O'Meara, Former Chair, Maine Republican Party
Robert F. Orr, Former Justice, North Carolina Supreme Court (ret.)
Jan Peter Ozga
Richard Painter, Former Associate Counsel to the President and Chief White House Ethics Lawyer for President George W. Bush
Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015 (D)
Jed Pauker, Co-Founding Board Member, Venice Resistance
Tony Payne, Former Executive Director, Maine GOP
Valerie Plame
John D. Podesta, Former White House Chief of Staff and Former Senior Advisor to the President
Michael PodhorzerJen Porter
Trevor Potter, Chairman and Commissioner of the Federal Election Commission from 1991 to 1995; General Counsel to John McCain’s Presidential Campaign from 2000 to 2008
Edward A Powell, Former Assistant Secretary for Management and Deputy Secretary (Acting) at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; CEO, USO World HQ; Defense Business Board
Kristopher Purcell, Former White House Aide in the George W. Bush Administration
Marc Racicot
Alan Charles Raul, Associate Counsel to the President in the Reagan Administration from 1986 to 1988
Reid Ribble, Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Wisconsin from 2015 to 2017. (R)
Kathleen Rice, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of New York from 2015 to 2023 (D)
Stephen Richer, Maricopa County Recorder from 2021 to 2025 (R)
Hon. Denver Riggleman, Representative of the 5th Congressional District of Virginia from 2019 to 2021 (R)
Robert Riley
Amb. John Ritch, Former U.S. Representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency
Bill Ritter, Governor of Colorado from 2007 to 2011 (D)
Miriam Rocah
Anthony Romero, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union
Theodore Roosevelt IV
Paul Rosenzweig, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Department of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush Administration from 2005 to 2009
Steve Russell, Representative of the 5th Congressional District of Oklahoma from 2015 to 2019 (R)
Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina from 2003 to 2011; Representative of the 1st Congressional District of South Carolina from 1995 to 2001 and again from 2013 to 2019 (R)
Anthony Scaramucci
Steven M. Schneebaum
Claudine Schneider, Representative of the 2nd Congressional District of Rhode Island from 1981-1991 (R)
Nancy Schulte
Kathleen Sebelius
Ricki Seidman, Former Senior Counselor to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security
James M. Seif
Joe Sestak, Former Vice Admiral, U.S. Navy and U.S. Congressman (PA-07)
Tara Setmayer, Co-Founder, The Seneca Project
Rina Shah, Geopolitical Adviser & Former RNC Delegate
Robert B. Shanks, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Office of Legal Counsel, 1981-1985
Hon. Phil Sharp, Representative of the 10th and 2nd District of Indiana from 1975-1983 and 1983-1995 (D)
Kate Shaw
Christopher Shays, Representative of the 4th Congressional District of Connecticut from 1987 to 2009 (D)
Donald Sherman, Executive Director and Chief Counsel, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)
Steve Silverman
David Skaggs, Representative of the 2nd Congressional District of Colorado from 1987 to 1999 (D)
Anne-Marie Slaughter, Professor Emerita, Princeton University
Fern Smith, Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California appointed by President Reagan from 1988 to 2005
Hon. Peter Smith
Craig Snyder, Former Chief of Staff to U.S. Senator Arlen Specter
Ilya Somin, Law Professor at George Mason University
Julia Spiegel
Richard Stengel, Former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy
Stuart Stevens
Robin Tallon, Representative of the 6th District of South Carolina from 1983 to 1993 (D)
Neera Tanden, President and CEO, Center for American Progress
Michael Teter, Attorney & Managing Director, The 65 Project
Jennifer Thomas & Emma Addams, Co-Executive Directors, Mormon Women for Ethical Government
James Tierney, Former Attorney General of Maine
Jeff Timmer, The Lincoln Project
Ann Toback, CEO, The Workers Circle
Carmen Torres
Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University
David Trott, Representative of the 11th Congressional District of Michigan from 2015 to 2019 (R)
Olivia Troye, Special Advisor, Homeland Security and Counterterrorism to Vice President Mike Pence, 2018-2020
F. Andrew Turley, Major General, USAF (ret.)
Susan W. Turnbull
Chris Vance, Former Chairman, Washington State Republican Party
Josh Venable, Former Chief of Staff, U.S. Department of Education
Alexander S. Vindman, Lt. Col., U.S. Army (ret.)
Michael Waldman, President, Brennan Center for Justice
Liz Wally
Joe Walsh
Matt Walton, 2015 Republican Nominee, 74th District of the Virginia House of Delegates
Austin Weatherford
Judge William H. Webster
Randi Weingarten
Ellen L. Weintraub, Commissioner, Federal Election Commission, 2002-2025
Wendy Weiser, Vice President for Democracy, Brennan Center for Justice
Robert Weissman, Co-President, Public Citizen
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, Colonel, USA (ret.)
Gregory P. Wilson, Deputy Assistant Secretary, U.S. Department of the Treasury, 1986-1989
Rick Wilson, The Lincoln Project
Jonathan M Winer, Former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and Special Envoy for Libya
Timothy Wirth, U.S. Senator for the State of Colorado from 1987 to 1993; Representative of the 8th Congressional District of Colorado from 1975 to 1987 (D)
Ann S. Womble
John Yarmuth, Former Chairman of the House Budget Committee, 3rd District of Kentucky from 2007-2023 (D)

__________

 

Donald Trump is going completely CRAZY. Threatening and suing universities, media organizations, journalists, judges, prosecutors, non-profit organizations, law firms, etc.

"Let them hate,

so long as they fear."

 

...So as the second Trump administration careens from one failure to another, as unhappiness with the president rises, as events and reality refuse to bend to his will, he will become darker and crueler and more unstable. His advisers, all of whom are afraid to stand up to him, will enable him. And the MAGA movement, more cult-like than ever, more walled off from reality than ever, will stay with him until the end.

Leaders who have been worse—more ruthless and more skilled than Trump—have been stopped, and few nations have been blessed by a system of government as wise and resilient as what our Founders created. Many of our institutions are stronger than those in most other nations. So Trump is hardly invincible, and many millions of Americans will not give up without a fight. My hope and expectation is that they will prevail, that America will prevail, but it will come at quite a cost…

—Peter Wehner, "America's Mad King"

Also worth your time:

A Loophole That Would Swallow the Constitution
If Donald Trump can disappear people to El Salvador without due process, he can do anything.
By Jonathan Chait

Donald trump’s most frightening power grab was undertaken with an undertone of sinister jocularity. There was no column of tanks in the streets, no burning of the legislature. The president and his partner in despotism, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, were bantering amiably in the Oval Office in front of the press corps, mocking the American court system with evident delight.

Trump’s ploy is almost insultingly simple. He has seized the power to arrest any person and whisk them to Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where they will be held indefinitely without trial. Once they are in Bukele’s custody, Trump can deny them the protections of American law. His administration has admitted that one such prisoner, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was sent to El Salvador in error, but insists that it has no recourse. Trump, who has threatened the territorial integrity of multiple hemispheric neighbors, now claims that requesting the return of a prisoner he paid El Salvador to take would violate that country’s sovereignty…

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT, April 17, 2025 (pdf)

…The Executive is inherently focused upon ends; the Judiciary much more so upon means. Ends are bestowed on the Executive by electoral outcomes. Means are entrusted to all of government, but most especially to the Judiciary by the Constitution itself.

The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?∗ And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would lose its meaning….

The basic differences between the branches mandate a serious effort at mutual respect. The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive’s respect for the courts. Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate…

It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.

In sum, and for the reasons foregoing, we deny the motion for the stay pending appeal and the writ of mandamus in this case. It is so ordered.

Oopsie… 

Smackdown? Well, we'll see where that goes from here.

UPDATE:

REALLY SICK OF ALL THIS TRUMP STUFF THIS WEEK

 

Some new readings...

 

 

Came on to Becker via a Science Magazine Review. The Amazon blurb for More Everything Forever:

forThis "wild and utterly engaging narrative" (Melanie Mitchell) shows why Silicon Valley’s heartless, baseless, and foolish obsessions—with escaping death, building AI tyrants, and creating limitless growth—are about oligarchic power, not preparing for the future.

Tech billionaires have decided that they should determine our futures for us. According to Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and more, the only good future for humanity is one powered by technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, served by superintelligent AIs.  

In More Everything Forever, science journalist Adam Becker investigates these wildly implausible and often profoundly immoral visions of tomorrow—and shows why, in reality, there is no good evidence that they will, or should, come to pass. Nevertheless, these obsessions fuel fears that overwhelm reason—for example, that a rogue AI will exterminate humanity—at the expense of essential work on solving crucial problems like climate change. What’s more, these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the reality is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.  

More Everything Forever exposes the powerful and sinister ideas that dominate Silicon Valley, challenging us to see how foolish, and dangerous, these visions of the future are. 

Comes out April 22nd. I also had to go after heis earlier book.

 

apropoa of the new one:

Came to this via Substack.

Careless People: The Book Meta Doesn’t Want You to Read

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams could almost be one of Christopher Buckley’s Beltway satires. Like Thank You for Smoking or The White House Mess, the first-person protagonist takes the reader on a journey from dream job to absurd nightmare—each chapter an ironic critique of the powerful characters depicted. Except Wynn-Williams is real, and so are the truly awful people and events she describes. “…like watching a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them,” she writes in the prologue.

The subtitle, A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism aptly describes this memoir, which begins with Wynn-Williams’s story of surviving a shark attack at the age of 13 in her native New Zealand and ends with her being escorted by security from the shark-infested headquarters at Facebook twenty-five years later. Hired in 2011 as the Manager of Global Public Policy, Wynn-Williams conveys her initial enthusiasm as a true believer in the power of Facebook to be a force for good and, on that basis, how she pitched the idea of a policy role for herself at a time when the leadership did not yet grasp why the company would need to build relationships with state leaders...
 

Stay tuned...

Klaas is back in session yet again

“Passionate, insightful, and occasionally jaw-dropping, Corruptible sets out the story of the intoxicating lure of power—and how it has shaped the modern world.” —Peter Frankopan, internationally bestselling author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

“We know power corrupts, but how exactly? Is it a quick moral collapse or a slow rot? Dangerous as a drug addiction, power changes both those who have it and those who just want a quick fix. Klaas gives us a new, insightful, and seditious road map to this primal urge to dominate, which, thankfully, not all of us share equally.” —Richard Engel, chief foreign correspondent of NBC News

“The power-hungry don’t ask why, they only ask why not…. Keeping such people far from the levers of power is at least half the battle, as Brian Klaas explains so well in Corruptible—a GPS system for navigating a world increasingly full of illiberal democracies, modernized dictatorships, and populists who care only for power.” —Garry Kasparov, chairman of both the Renew Democracy Initiative and the Human Rights Foundation and former world chess champion

“A brilliant exploration… This book builds Brian Klaas’s reputation, offering an essential guide through our world of democratic decay, corruption, and cronyism.” —Dan Snow, bestselling author of On This Day in History

Brian Klaas rocks. I am havin' too much fun, deeply into this one. Just as with his prior book Flukes.

 

Could not be more timely, in the wake of Donald Trump's election victory.

 

The book is packed with cool observations.

 

More...

Baby Faces and Bigotry

In your daily life, you likely encounter dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of strangers. Even in places you frequent, such as the grocery store or your office building, you’ll cross paths with people who are completely unknown to you. If you’re a frequent flier, or if you live in a major metropolis, encountering people who speak a different language, wear different clothes, or come from different cultures is routine.

But for our hunter-gatherer ancestors, such encounters were exceedingly rare. Because of territoriality, venturing into unknown land was akin to playing Russian roulette. The biologist and author Jared Diamond, in his book The World Until Yesterday, argues that hunter-gatherers classify everyone into three groups: friends, enemies, or strangers. Friends are those dozens of families that make up your band, or who are from bands you’re on good terms with. Enemies are people you recognize, but are from a rival band that lives in the same area. The third camp—strangers—are rare. But, to be safe, you must automatically assume they’re potential enemies. In the prehistoric past, hunter-gatherers would never meet someone who was from halfway across the world, meaning that encounters with people from different races were effectively close to zero. As a result, racism couldn’t have been reinforced by psychological evolution over hundreds of thousands of years the same way that biases for height and gender were. Plus, given the origins of our species, most Stone Age hunter-gatherers didn’t look remotely like modern Europeans or Americans. So, is all racism culturally learned?

Unfortunately, our Stone Age brains produce serious biases about people who look different. For survival, our social species has evolved to quickly use cues to identify whether someone is like us, and a friend, or unlike us, and a potential foe. This impulse gives rise to what social scientists call sorting between “in-group” and “out-group” individuals. In-group individuals are to be embraced, while out-group individuals are to be shunned, driven off, or even killed. Crucially, those from an out-group are more likely to be people that we see as potential threats—a point that we’ll return to momentarily.

Today, many people still rely on these arcane, bigoted sorting mechanisms as a cognitive shortcut, even though it’s completely irrational…

…Our prehistoric templates for determining in-groups and out-groups shift our behavior, even when it’s irrational and damaging to our best interests. We trust those whom we identify with. But we’re suspicious of those who don’t seem to be “one of us.

In the modern world, those templates from ancestral brains intersect with centuries of explicit and implicit culturally learned racism to create even more biased assessments of those who are from a different, particularly minority, ethnic group. That’s demonstrated with some depressing research that shows white Westerners sometimes behave as though black people are “strangers” who are potential threats—a phenomenon that further compounds the systemic institutional racism that plagues modern societies.

All human faces can be scored by how baby-faced they appear (the technical term is babyfaceness). Countless experiments have demonstrated that we instinctively pay attention to this trait when assessing others—and judge them based upon it. In the criminal justice system, there’s evidence that judges and juries treat baby-faced defendants as less responsible or culpable for their actions than less baby-faced defendants, even if they’re the same age. We seem to automatically believe that babyfaceness is a proxy for innocence. As a result, those who are more baby-faced are often perceived as less threatening than those with more hardened, adult facial features.

But there’s a disheartening twist.

Studies have found that whether babyfaceness helps or hurts you gain power is dependent on race. Here’s what the research seems to show: Black people are more likely to be viewed by white people as threatening. That’s partly because of the “strangers” template in our Stone Age brains and partly due to a long, grotesque history of learned and internalized racism. No surprise there. But just as white people are more prone to viewing black people as threats, they’re less prone to viewing baby-faced black people that way, according to experiments. Further research has shown that, in a white-dominated society, baby-faced black people are therefore more able to attain power than less baby-faced black people. White people view black people with more adult faces as a threat, leading to reduced career advancement. According to this research, this relationship is inverted for white people. In similar studies, baby-faced white CEOs were perceived to be weak rather than threatening. In a white-dominated society, it seems that having a baby face helps you if you’re black and hurts you if you’re white. It’s horrifyingly bonkers. But it seems, on aggregate, to make a difference that compounds preexisting racial biases in society. The point is this: irrational evaluations of faces based on archaic threat instincts still seem to be entrenching inequality in our modern world.

This could partially explain (but never excuse) why highly qualified people from ethnic minorities often get passed over for leadership positions in favor of less qualified white people…

Klaas, Brian. Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us (pp. 79-82). Scribner. Kindle Edition.

Indeed.
 

DIGRESSING FOR A MOMENT

Brian has a Substack site he's named The Garden of Forking Paths. I'm a paid subscriber. Snippet below from a recent post:

How I write
I, like everyone else, learned to write by reading. Brains are pattern detection machines, and we intuit how those patterns should look by observing them elsewhere.

But creativity requires recombination that breaks patterns; if we only recreated the world as we observed it, nothing new would ever be produced. The Middle Ages captured this dynamic by giving the world florilegia, or “gathered flowers,” which were bound anthologies of various snippets of wisdom or creativity.

All ideas are built on life’s florilegia, and a writer’s brain, like a flower, can only grow if it is given the right sustenance. That sustenance is some combination of life experience and observation, interaction with clever and passionate people, and, of course, reading.

Every writer, like every human, is a sort of mind thief—not due to plagiarism or dishonesty—but simply because our brains cannot produce a purely “original” idea. Creativity is little more than interesting, novel synthesis. Just as a musician is swayed by the tunes they feed their minds, so too is a writer shaped by the authors they deliberately consume. If I am writing a whimsical essay, I might sit down and read Douglas Adams or Kurt Vonnegut for an hour before I start typing, an offering of time to my playful muse as much as a subconscious prime for the mind.

As I’ve written previously, every good idea I’ve ever had has sprung, at least in part, from someone else’s good idea.

If you want to write, you must do at least two things relentlessly: observe the world and read. Crucially, though, you must observe and read what you don’t know, because otherwise the soil around you becomes overly stale. I have decidedly strange interests, so my bedside table is currently occupied by a teetering stack of books: one about plant consciousness; another about consumerism in modern Christianity; one on the history of ignorance; a Slow Horses thriller for good measure; and a delightful tome about the decline of belief in magic...

Be Yourself
When we converse, we are allergic to inauthentic interaction. You know what I’m talking about: the office bore who is always networking, always saying aggravating phrases like “let’s connect,” but never actually connecting with anyone. Our minds come, I happily note, fully equipped with bullshit detectors, and this aptitude for sniffing out fakery carries over into the realm of the written word. There is a lot of inauthentic same-y sludge out there, which has an astonishing tendency—at least on the nonfiction side of the ledger—to always appear, like an obscenely wealthy but dimwitted demon, on the bestseller lists in airport bookshops.

Even non-fiction requires characters. It’s obvious that fiction is character-driven. But conveying any idea in a compelling way for us—The Storytelling Animal—requires narrative, and narrative often works best when it flows, at least in part, through intriguing people...

Great advice. You ought read that entire essay.

 

QUICK REACTION

I was a rather unremarkable "B" student through high school. But, I always loved to read, from early childhood. I have routinely read multiple books and periodicals ongoing throughout my entire adult life. When I finally entered undergraduate school at the age of 34 in 1980, I first took the CLEP exam (College Level English Proficiency). The national 99th percentile score at the time was 920.

Mine was 965. It saved me a year of Freshman English classes.

You just gotta read.

Now nearing age 79, I continue to average 2-3 books a week, 6 subscribed periodicals, and the broad raft of online prose.

Brian is right. Read. Explore. Be awake. And, learn to compose stories.

We'll take this riff up more fully later.

BTW, Klaas was back in earlier session on Nov 7th.

DEC 1ST UPDATE

.

I finished reading Corruptible. Marvelous. You owe it to yourselves to read and enjoy.

On to the next topics...

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Now streaming: The Oaf of Office, Season 2

 

This appeared on TwitterX today, posted by a Trump insider:

1. Restoring Presidential Authority
Trump intends to reissue an executive order from 2020 which would restore the president's authority to remove federal employees, thereby allowing for the aggressive management or dismissal of federal workers.

2. Overhauling National Security and Intelligence
Trump's plan includes removing individuals from national security and intelligence agencies who have engaged in corrupt practices or have used these agencies against political adversaries.

3. Reform of FISA Courts
He proposes a comprehensive reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts to address issues where judges have ignored misleading information in warrant applications.

4. Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Plans to establish a commission to declassify and make public all documents related to alleged deep state activities like spying, censorship, and corruption.

5. Crackdown on Leaks
Trump plans to pursue legal actions against individuals involved in unauthorized leaks that contribute to misleading media narratives.

6. Independence of Inspectors General
Ensure that inspector general offices are physically separate from the departments they oversee to maintain objectivity and prevent them from becoming part of the entrenched bureaucracy.

7. Independent Auditing System
Establishment of a system to continually monitor intelligence agencies to prevent unauthorized surveillance of citizens or disinformation campaigns.

8. Geographic Redistribution of Bureaucracy
Continue the initiative of relocating federal offices outside of Washington, D.C., to other parts of the country, reducing the concentration of bureaucracy in the capital.

9. Ban on Post-Government Employment
Prohibit federal bureaucrats from taking positions at companies they previously regulated or dealt with to prevent conflicts of interest.

10. Term Limits for Congress
Push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress, aiming to reduce the influence of long-term incumbents and refresh the political landscape.

Yeah. Blah, blah, blah. We'll see...

_________

  

Trump Forever?

Donald Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee, and he has vowed revenge on his political enemies. His voters want revenge as well—on their fellow citizens.

Last night’s Iowa caucus results confirm that Donald Trump is almost certainly headed for the GOP presidential nomination. So much for the hopes of establishment Republicans (the handful who remain, anyway) and other conservatives that voters would refuse to join Trump’s personal crusade for vengeance against the American system of government.

Such hopes were always the thinnest of reeds: The Republican base actively embraces Trump’s grievances; it emulates his pettiness; it supports his childlike inability to accept responsibility. These voters are not sighing in resignation and voting for the lesser of two or three or four evils. They are getting what they want—because they, too, are set on revenge.

These voters are not settling a political score. Rather, they want to get even with other Americans, their own neighbors, for a simmering (and likely unexpected) humiliation that many of them seem to have felt ever since swearing loyalty to Trump.

A lot of people, especially in the media, have a hard time accepting this simple truth…

 

      — Tom Nichols

ON DECK

 

Read a review in my new Science Magazine.

A family history of the Universe
Musings on natural phenomena merge with tales from a science journalist’s personal life

The voice of Nell Greenfieldboyce may well already be in your head. The longtime National Public Radio (NPR) science reporter steadily brings listeners news from deep inside the cell, the ocean, space, and more. In Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life, her essays elucidate tornadoes, meteors, black holes, and fleas, among other phenomena of our shared world. She also probes deeply into her own past and psyche, interweaving facts with personal history. In print as in radio, her voice is wry, charming, informative, and, indeed, sometimes strange. (The title references Walt Whitman’s poem “Year of Meteors.”)

The prompting to bring often lofty science findings down to the private realm is instigated when Greenfieldboyce becomes a parent. “I suddenly had a new audience. A much smaller audience—only two, instead of millions,” she writes, “but with higher emotional stakes.”...

Stay tuned...

_________

 

U.S. 2022 midterms draw nigh

 

I don't think it's possible to overstate the importance of the upcoming November 8th midterms. Make sure you vote.
 

OK, a momentary respite from all of our sociopolitical discord.

 

 

UPDATE

 

Jacob just posted an artistic animated visual rendering of this song.

 

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