Category: Law

“Now Let Them Enforce It”

Posted on by documentingdescent

In a move that should surprise no one who has even once paid attention to Donald Trump’s modus operandi, U.S. District Judge John McConnell has found that the White House is in violation of a court order requiring them to restore funding to federal departments and agencies. Currently locked out due to the White House’s funding freeze, units like the National Institute of Health can’t pay for obligations that are already on the books.

In a nutshell, the judge ordered them to unfreeze the funds, and they just haven’t complied. JD Vance, in tweets during the Superbowl on Sunday, suggested courts don’t have the authority to tell the President what to do. Other than the years they spent demanding Biden adhere to court orders, this is farcical on the face of it. If the courts don’t have the authority to dictate law in terms of the Executive Branch, then there is absolutely no reason to listen to anything the Supreme Court says whatsoever when it comes to the Executive.

The problem is, of course, that there is no mechanism for the courts to enforce this sort of thing in terms of physical people who will arrive and force it, aside from possibly the US Marshals.

This is, of course, on purpose. The phrase “constitutional crisis” may seem overused these days, but in this case it’s pretty valid. Should Trump decide not to listen to the court order, we’ll be ramming head first into a wall at Mach 1. And Chief Justice Roberts will no doubt wring his hands and go, “Well shit.” Well, Roberts, you set this shit up. We’re ALL on the ride now.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. In 1832, in Worcester v. Georgia, President Andrew Jackson apocryphally said “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” He did express similar sentiments, however.

The Office of Religious Fuckery

Posted on by documentingdescent

Oh yeah. One more thing that happened this week. This shit.

The executive order for “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias”.

The legal framework is there, based on previous protected classes, and anti-semitic bullshit pulled by nazis. But it’s being applied in such an ass backwards way it’s offensive. Just a drop in the bucket for this week, but worth noting for future bullshit references.

Weekly Roundup, February 7

Posted on by documentingdescent

Playing Catch Up

I was too ill to post effectively last week, and this week I’ve been too busy. So consider this weekly catch up for the past two weeks for what I think are the most important things that have happened, as well as the most important things not to forget. The Bannon idea of “flood the zone” with actions is definitely underway, with Trump issuing EO after EO, and Musk directing his minions to do all kinds of things, so it’s been tough to keep up.

In light of that, I think it’s important not to focus on every little thing that happens. Yes, they matter. Yes, many of them are reprehensible. However, trying to keep up with every rant or mad idea is frankly untenable in light of their sheer volume. So instead, let’s talk about the more salient points from one specific perspective: to whit, Trump is not a distraction, but he is not the only player in the room. He was supported by groups such as the Heritage Foundation, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. All part of either Project 2025, or the so-called ‘dark enlightenment’ movement espoused by Curtis Yarvin, or both.

Trump may sit behind the Resolute Desk, but given his absolutely illiterate nature, utter inexperience with legal matters other than lawsuits, and utter disregard for anything longer than a TV snippet, it seems obvious that many of the people around him are drafting the EOs and policies he is pushing. To whit, he cares about money, his image, and revenge. Probably in that order, but not always.

DOGE and its Employees

Elon Musk’s DOGE and his cadre of youths have been running roughshod over a vast swath of federal departments and institutions since just after the inauguration. Their actions have amounted to the largest breach of digital security in the history of anything computational, and by a wide margin as well. This is because these systems are designed to be secure and isolated, yet he’s had his team start connecting external and unvetted machines to them. They have data tunnels to outside systems, and have been both hoovering up the personal data of millions of Americans, and mucking about in production code directly without testing the code.

Aside from the central leadership, their boots on the ground are basically children. This team is largely between the ages of 19-25 years of age, and none of them have more than a cursory understanding of security, software, or government. Many are fresh out of high school, or only finished 1-2 years of college before being hired by either SpaceX, Tesla, or an allied venture capital firm.

There’s been no vetting of them other than Musk’s “trust me, bro”. Prior to DOGE, some had been working with Russia, soliciting illegal cyberattacks, espousing the need for eugenics and the destruction of non-white races. After resigning for making these statements, the last one was re-hired following the enthusiastic endorsement of both Trump and JD Vance. That was yesterday, I guess.

Vance and several others have said statements made on social media in earlier times shouldn’t ruin somebody’s life or prevent them from having a good career. Putting aside the fact that they would like to do exactly that to anyone who opposes them, Marko Elez made his eugenics statements in September 2024. So I guess we all have to have memories of goldfish now.

So which departments have the Muskenjugend hit so far, and what have they done?

  • The United States Agency for International Development
    • USAID is instrumental in promoting democracy around the world. It was created to counteract Soviet influence in 1961, but was instrumental in ending Apartheid in South Africa. This may explain some of Musk’s animus toward it, and it was likely a convenient test target because very few people inside the United States had heard of it.
    • Lawsuits over this are currently flying left and right, and are ongoing, after staffers were locked out without warning.
  • Office of Personnel Management
    • With access to OPM, DOGE gained access to records relating to other agencies’ activities, and who was involved in things they can target in their DEI witch hunt. This has allowed them to search for ‘disloyalty.’
    • Totally taken over, lawsuits incoming,
  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
    • It’s long been a desire for the people behind Project 2025 to destroy the NOAA so that weather information can be privatized and sold via outlets like The Weather Channel.
    • The NOAA is also embarrassing to them because it keeps finding evidence of climate change, which they insist is not real.
    • Not sure what the current state of NOAA is right now.
  • Health and Human Services
    • HHS oversees the National Institute of Health and the Center for Disease Control. Both of these angered Trump during the COVID pandemic, so he’s happy to see them gone.
    • Musk and the 2025 crew want their activities privatized so that we have to pay more for basic health research and they can make money off of it. This also shunts their public institution grant money into coffers they feel are better used by private research.
    • Destroying these also hurts trans people. As usual, the cruelty is the point – or part of the point.
    • Lawsuits incoming.
  • Treasury
    • The goal was to gain the levers of payment for everything the government does. The Secretary of the Treasury said DOGE had merely read-only access to it; this turned out to be a lie, they were writing code to the servers. Or attempting to.
    • There’s a current legal injunction against DOGE from doing anything on the Treasury servers, and ordered the deletion of data they’ve hoovered. We shall see if they obey the order. But it does seem they are currently locked out for the time being.
  • Department of Labor
    • Blocked from their takeover by unions, for now.
  • Department of Education
    • “No such government department exists” tweeted Musk on Friday.
    • Dissolving the Department of Education has been a goal for a long time, for 2025. More money for private religious schools in conservative states, less money for public education, less oversight over curriculum.
    • It also has the practical upshot of totally disrupting federal student loans, for now. They may want college to be entirely fueled by predatory loans or keep it entirely in the hands of the wealthy. A poorly educated population tends to be more in line with their desires.
  • Department of Energy
    • No clue where they’re at with the DOE yet.
  • Housing and Urban Development
    • No clue where they’re at with HUD either. Supposedly their actions won’t affect Section 8 payments, but they’re likely to impact Public Housing.
    • This falls in line with Trump and 2025ers wanting to look good for veterans, as VASH is part of Section 8.
    • Perhaps more importantly, Section 8 is already wealth transfer from Federal coffers to landlords. Many may be mom and pop type owners, but many are also large corporate owners.
    • Secretary of HUD Scott Turner, who I believe is a former football player, has announced he will no longer be enforcing HUD’s 2016 rule “Equal Access in Accordance With an Individual’s Gender Identity in Community Planning and Development Programs” due to Trump’s EOs.

There are definitely other agencies affected, but these are the ones I remember and the specific states they’re in as far as I recall. I’ll try to keep up with more of this madness as it unfolds, but life happens even when your country is tearing itself apart.

Trump’s Territorial Ambitions

Trump’s talked a lot about taking back the Panama Canal, invading Mexico, taking Greenland, owning Gaza and the West Bank, and even making Canada the 51st state. He’s said these things repeatedly, and that he’s not joking.

Do I believe him? Unequivocally yes.

Do I think he can do it? Not without kicking off World War 3. The Panama Canal is probably the safest of these, but any move against Greenland or Canada would absolutely incite war. Mexico would as well, but that would probably go to a global war slightly slower than the other two. It still would, but it wouldn’t be, to use nuclear terminology, a “prompt critical”.

Ultimately, he thinks of power as money and land ownership, because he’s a sleazy real estate developer. So seeing big colors on a big map appeals to his “I’m a big boy now!” attitude. And Gaza is it’s own morass that is just so monumentally stupid as to be nearly unbelievable, but he’s a monumentally stupid man. As one internet wit put it, “Yeah, when did anything bad ever happen after the USA tripped dick-first into the Middle East?”

Make no mistake, though: despite calling Canada the 51st state, none of these places would be states. They’d be territorial possessions, because why on earth would you annex anywhere that hates you and then give them an ounce of power?

Signing off for now. I’ll try to be better about keeping up with the day by day.

The First Week

Posted on by documentingdescent

I had intended to start this blog on January 20th, the day of the inauguration. Unfortunately, the SSL certificate kept refusing to install properly, which blocked me from getting things set up until now. So I’ve decided to a first week recap instead, focusing on what has actually happened, rather than proposals. I am not interested (for now) in what people are exhorting the administration to do, but what they actually do.

This all comes on the heels of Los Angeles burning in all directions – some of the worst fires the state’s ever seen. The Palisades fire has destroyed a lot of Malibu and most of Pacific Palisades, as well as outskirts of Santa Monica. The Eaton fire basically erased Altadena from the map and is burning in the San Gabriels at the moment. The Castaic fire which was threatening Santa Clarita and Castaic Junction is getting contained, but not without getting perilously close to a lot of homes.

So, the past few weeks have been a bit of a lot.

A short list of executive actions in the first week of Trump’s second term. This is not all of them, but the primary ones of interest:

  • Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States
    • This executive order indicates deployment of “as many units or members of the Armed Forces, including the Ready Reserve and the National Guard, as the Secretary of Defense determines to be appropriate to support the activities of the Secretary of Homeland Security in obtaining complete operational control of the southern border of the United States.”
  • Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program
    • This order has effectively halted all refugee admissions into the United States for the time being, including individuals who had previously been accepted but had yet to arrive in the United States. This includes military translators and advisors from countries such as Afghanistan. Others affected include refugees fleeing Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
  • Reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy
    • This was not a new executive order but reactivation of one from his first term, wherein individuals attempting to enter the United States from Mexico must remain there until they are officially accepted as either residents or refugees. Coupled with the previous executive order, that time may be never.
  • Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship
    • This order attempts to rescind or redefine the nature of “birthright citizenship” as established in the constitution. Department of Justice lawyers have attempted to argue this week that citizenship is only granted to children born in the United States if one of their parents is already a citizen or lawful permanent resident.
    • If upheld, this would in effect create large numbers of stateless individuals, as certain countries do not regard children born abroad to be citizens, even if one or more of their parents are citizens of that country.
    • In a Seattle courtroom, these lawyers also argued that Native Americans are not citizens of the United States, because their primary allegiance is to their tribe, rather than the United States. U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour has placed a 14-day hold on this executive order, and gave the DoJ lawyers a dressing down when they suggested Native Americans were “subject to the laws of the United States” but then asserted they were not “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.”
      • I.E. they argued Natives were not citizens, but were still beholden to United States law. The judge was not having any of that.
    • This order will no doubt face other legal challenges on the basis of the 14th amendment.
  • Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government
    • This order prohibits any member of the Executive Branch and associated agencies from recognizing someone’s gender may differ from their biological sex, or assisting in documentation to that effect. This has also paused all new intersex/agender passport applications, per Acting Secretary of State Marco Rubio
    • The order also indicates one’s sex is determined by their sex at conception. At conception, a zygote has no sex. It is a mass of cells.

There are other directives, executive orders, and proclamations I haven’t listed, of course. Muzzling the NIH, CDC, and other federal health agencies unless they run every public statement past the Executive Branch, for instance. The halt of federal funding for all medical trials being run by higher institutions of learning – and federal funding for certain other sciences as well. Pulling all federal funding for the World Health Organization. Trying to use Schedule F to reclassify federal employees, though unions are fighting that in court. The “anti-DEI” initiatives across all federal agencies, even NASA.

Interestingly, while he fired a shit ton of women in advisory positions, he seemed to leave most of the men in their jobs. Surely this is a coincidence.

There’s almost too much to catalog in this one week, but that – as told by Stephen Miller – was literally part of their plan. To overwhelm resistance with a firehose of action.

More to come as days unfold.