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October 3, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

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Former Republican representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming joined Vice President Kamala Harris on a stage hung with red, white, and blue bunting and signs that said “Country Over Party.” As Cheney took the stage, the crowd chanted, “Thank you, Liz!” The two were on the campaign trail today in Ripon, Wisconsin, the town that claims to be the birthplace of the Republican Party. It was in that then-tiny town in 1852 that Alvan E. Bovay, who had recently emigrated from New York, called for a new political party to stand against slavery. 

The idea of a new party took off in 1854 when it became clear the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting the westward expansion of human enslavement would become law. When they met in February of that year, people in Ripon were early participants in the movement of people across the North to defend democracy. Rather than standing against slavery alone, those organizing in 1854 stood against an entire political system, opposing the small group of elite enslavers who had taken over the U.S. government in order to establish an oligarchy and were quite clear they rejected the self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal. Instead, they intended to rule over the nation’s majority, whose labor produced the capital that southern leaders believed only elites should control.  

In the face of this existential threat to the country, party divisions crumbled.

Pundits have described today’s event as a component of Harris’s ongoing outreach to Republicans, and in part, it is. That outreach, begun under President Joe Biden and continuing even more aggressively under Harris, is bearing fruit as in an open letter today, two dozen Republican former officials and lawmakers in Wisconsin endorsed Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz. “We have plenty of policy disagreements with Vice President Harris,” the Republicans wrote. “But what we do agree upon is more important. We agree that we cannot afford another four years of the broken promises, election denialism, and chaos of Donald Trump’s leadership.”

Lately, there have been indications of what returning Trump to office might mean. 

On Tuesday, Trump suggested that the U.S. soldiers who sustained traumatic brain injuries (TBI) when Iran attacked an Iraqi base where they were stationed were not truly injured, but simply had “headaches.” Trump’s statement brought back to light a 2021 CBS report by Catherine Herridge and Michael Kaplan that found the injured soldiers had not been recognized with a Purple Heart, awarded to service members wounded or killed in the line of duty, despite qualifying for it. This slight meant they were denied the medical benefits that come with that military decoration. 

The soldiers told Herridge and Kaplan that they were pressured to downplay their injuries to avoid undercutting Trump’s attempt to keep the casualty numbers in that incident low. With the story back in the news, Kaplan posted that after the report, the Army awarded the soldiers the Purple Hearts they deserved. 

Journalist Magdi Jacobs recalled the argument of Trump’s lawyers before the Supreme Court that Trump could not prod a SEAL team to assassinate a rival because service members would adhere to the rules of their institutions. The Army officers’ bowing to Trump’s political demands proved that argument was wrong and set off “[m]ajor alarm bells,” Jacobs posted, suggesting that the military would not stand firm against Trump in a second term, especially now that the Supreme Court says a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of official duties.

Scott Waldman and Thomas Frank of Politico’s E&E News covering energy and the environment reported today that two former White House officials said that Trump was “flagrantly partisan” when responding to natural disasters. One said that in 2018 Trump refused to approve disaster aid after wildfires to California, perceiving it as a Democratic state. To get disaster money, the aide showed Trump polling results revealing that Orange County, which had been badly damaged in the fires, “had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.”

Defending the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election, former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters in 2021 gave a security badge to a man associated with MyPillow owner Mike Lindell to enable him to breach the county’s voting systems in an unsuccessful attempt to find evidence of voter fraud. A jury found Peters guilty of four felonies related to the scheme. Today, District Court Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced Peters to nine years in prison. 

But there are other stories these days of what the government can accomplish when it is focused on the good of all Americans.

About 45,000 dock workers in the International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike Tuesday when the union could not reach an agreement with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping just as the areas hammered by Hurricane Helene desperately needed supplies. Dockworkers wanted a pay increase of up to 77% over six years and better benefits, as well as an end to the automation that threatens union jobs.

President Joe Biden reiterated his support for collective bargaining despite the threat to an economic slowdown from the strike. The Wall Street Journal editorial board excoriated Biden and the union, saying: “President Biden wants unions to have extortionary bargaining power, and he’s getting a demonstration of it on election eve. Congratulations.”

But today the International Longshoremen’s Association suspended the strike after USMX agreed to wage increases of 62% over six years. The two sides agreed to extend the current contract until January 15 to address the issues of benefits and automation. Administration officials White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, top White House economic advisor Lael Brainard, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg helped broker the temporary agreement. 

The government’s power to make things better is also on display amid the rubble and ruin left behind by Hurricane Helene. Yesterday evening, after taking an aerial tour of western North Carolina to survey the damage and receiving a briefing in Raleigh, President Biden thanked both “the Republican governor of South Carolina and the Democratic governor of North Carolina and all of the elected officials who’ve focused on the task at hand. In a moment like this, we put politics aside. At least we should put it all aside, and we have here. There are no Democrats or Republicans; there are only Americans. And our job is to help as many people as we can as quickly as we can and as thoroughly as we can.” 

Biden explained that the federal government had 1,000 first responders in place before the storms hit, and that he had approved emergency declarations as soon as he received the requests from the governors. Yesterday he directed the Defense Department to move 1,000 soldiers to reinforce North Carolina’s National Guard to speed up the delivery of supplies like food, water, and medicine to isolated communities, some of which are accessible now only by pack mule. 

He has already deployed 50 Starlink satellites for communication, and more are coming. 

Teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency are offering free temporary housing, as well as delivering food and water. They are helping people apply for the help that they need. 

While Trump and MAGA Republicans insist that Biden is botching the response to Helene, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted that the response has gotten bipartisan praise. Republican governors Henry McMaster of South Carolina and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia both thanked Biden by name for what McMaster called a “superb” response.  

So today’s bipartisan event in Ripon suggests far more than Democratic outreach to Republicans. It appears to be a commitment to a government that advances the interests of ordinary people, and protects the right of everyone to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government. Republican Abraham Lincoln articulated this worldview for his fledgling party in 1859 as it took a stand against oligarchs. Believing these principles accurately represented the aspirations of the nation’s founders, Lincoln called them “conservative.” People from all parties rallied to the party that promised to defend those principles. 

“The president of the United States must not look at our country through the narrow lens of ideology or petty partisanship or self-interest,” Harris said today. “The president of the United States must not look at our country as an instrument for their own ambitions. Our nation is not some spoil to be won. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised: the nation that inspired the world to believe in the possibility of a representative government. And so in the face of those who would endanger our magnificent experiment, people of every party must stand together.” 

“In this election, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration. It is our duty,” Cheney said. “I ask all of you here and everyone listening across this great country to join us. I ask you to meet this moment. I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump. 

“And I ask you instead to help us elect Kamala Harris for president. I know…that…a president Harris will be able to unite this nation. I know that she will be a president who will defend the rule of law, and I know that she will be a president who can inspire all of our children—and if I might say so, especially our little girls—to do great things. So help us right the ship of our democracy so that history will say of us, when our time of testing came, we did our duty and we prevailed because we loved our country more.” 

— 

Notes:

https://wisconsinexaminer.com/briefs/wisconsin-gop-group-launches-pro-harris-campaign-with-open-letter/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-liz-cheney-joins-harris-campaign-rally-in-ripon-wis

https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-cheney-wisconsin-trump-89396853e5521c3870a3c88e04cbfd99

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/02/nx-s1-5137349/kamala-harris-liz-cheney-wisconsin-little-white-schoolhouse

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/10/02/adam-kinzinger-republicans-colin-allred-texas/

https://www.eenews.net/articles/helene-isnt-the-first-time-trump-inserted-politics-into-a-natural-disaster/

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4914462-colorado-county-clerk-sentenced-election-breach/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/purple-heart-us-soldiers-iran-al-assad-air-base-attack-traumatic-brain-injury/

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/international-longshoremens-association-strike-ports-labor-union-president-biden-a586363d

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/03/port-strike-ends-as-workers-agree-to-tentative-deal-on-wages-and-contract-extension.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/03/port-strike-over/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ship-queue-grows-us-ports-dockworker-strike-enters-third-day-2024-10-03/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/10/02/remarks-by-president-biden-before-an-operational-briefing-on-the-impacts-of-hurricane-helene-raleigh-nc/

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/03/politics/fact-check-trump-biden-hurricane-response/index.html

https://www.axios.com/2024/10/01/hurricane-helene-north-carolina-mules-aid

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The NSA’s “Big Delete” Judd Legum

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National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. (Photo by NSA via Getty Images)

Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a “Big Delete” of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including “privilege,” “bias,” and “inclusion.” The “Big Delete,” according to an NSA source and internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information, is creating unintended consequences. Although the websites and other content are purportedly being deleted to comply with President Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or “DEI,” the dragnet is taking down “mission-related” work. According to the NSA source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, the process is “very chaotic,” but is plowing ahead anyway.

A memo distributed by NSA leadership to its staff says that on February 10, all NSA websites and internal network pages that contain banned words will be deleted. This is the list of 27 banned words distributed to NSA staff:

Anti-Racism
Racism
Allyship
Bias
DEI
Diversity
Diverse
Confirmation Bias
Equity
Equitableness
Feminism
Gender
Gender Identity
Inclusion
Inclusive
All-Inclusive
Inclusivity
Injustice
Intersectionality
Prejudice
Privilege
Racial Identity
Sexuality
Stereotypes
Pronouns
Transgender
Equality

The memo acknowledges that the list includes many terms that are used by the NSA in contexts that have nothing to do with DEI. For example, the term “privilege” is used by the NSA in the context of “privilege escalation.” In the intelligence world, privilege escalation refers to “techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network.”

The purge extends beyond public-facing websites to pages on the NSA’s internal network, including project management software like Jira and Confluence.

The NSA is trying to identify mission-related sites before the “Big Delete” is executed but appears to lack the personnel to do so. The NSA’s internal network has existed since the 1990s, and a manual review of the content is impractical. Instead, the NSA is working with “Data Science Development Program interns” to “understand the false-positive use cases” and “help generate query options that can better minimize false-positives.” Nevertheless, the NSA is anticipating “unintended downtime” of “mission-related” websites.

While Trump’s executive order claims to target “illegal and immoral discrimination programs,” the NSA’s banned-word list demonstrates that the implementation is far broader. The Trump administration is attempting to prohibit any acknowledgment that racism, stereotypes, and bias exist. The ban is so sweeping that “confirmation bias” — the tendency of people “to accept or notice information if it appears to support what they already believe or expect” — is included, even though it has nothing to do with race or gender.

Popular Information is an independent newsletter dedicated to accountability journalism since 2018. It is made possible by readers who upgrade to a paid subscription.

The government memory hole

Since Trump took office, thousands of web pages across various federal agencies have been altered or removed entirely. Federal agencies have taken down or edited resources about HIV, contraceptives, LGBTQ+ health, abortion, and climate change. Some web pages have later come back online “without clarity on what had been changed or removed.”

An analysis by the Washington Post of 8,000 federal web pages “found 662 examples of deletions and additions” since Trump took office. The analysis found that words like diversity, equity, and inclusion were removed at least 231 times from the websites of federal agencies, including the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Transportation.

One example included a job listing page for the Department of Homeland Security that removed language about maintaining an “inclusive environment.” The Post also found examples of words being removed that had nothing to do with DEI, such as a page on the Department of the Interior’s website that boasted of its museums’ “diverse collections,” removing the word “diverse.”

Following Trump’s executive orders targeting transgender individuals, multiple federal websites have removed transgender and intersex people from the acronym “LGBTQI,” NBC News reported. On the State Department website, a web page that used to provide resources for “LGBTQI Travelers” now addresses “LGB Travelers.” The Social Security Administration has made similar changes, with a page heading now reading “Social Security for LGBQ People.” Some agencies, including the Department of Education, have removed web pages with LGBTQ resources altogether.

On X, Elon Musk’s United States DOGE Service is celebrating the deletions:


We started a new publication, Musk Watch. NPR covered our launch HERE. It features accountability journalism focused on one of the most powerful humans in history. It is free to sign up, so we hope you’ll give it a try and let us know what you think.

Subscribe to Musk Watch


Federal agencies have also been scrubbing websites for mentions of climate change, which Trump has called a “hoax.” The Department of Agriculture’s Office of Communications issued a directive to “archive or unpublish any landing pages focused on climate change,” the Guardian reported. Resources on the Forest Service website, including the Climate Change Resource Center and the Climate Action Tracker, appear to still be unavailable. The Department of Transportation website replaced the phrase “climate change” with “climate resilience.”

Among the agencies with the most deleted web pages is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which took down over “3,000 pages,” according to the New York Times. In one example, data from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which tracks important health metrics, was temporarily unavailable, only to come back online later with “at least one of the gender columns missing and its data documentation removed.” A banner on the top of the CDC website states it is “being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.”

Last week, the Trump administration was sued by Doctors for America, a physicians’ group, for removing health resources and data from government websites, arguing that it “deprived clinicians and researchers of tools necessary to treat patients.”

 

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The Vibe Shift Comes to the Super Bowl. Plus. . . River Page

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It’s Monday, February 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Why USAID is the wrong hill for Dems to die on; why Trump is flooding the zone; how American educators are conning kids; and much more.

But first: The Super Bowl.

Boring game, huh? The Eagles beat the Chiefs in a 40–22 blowout that will have pleased my colleague Joe Nocera, but will not be remembered as a classic.

The Super Bowl isn’t just a game, it’s a cultural barometer—and sometimes, a crystal ball. In 2016, Beyoncé danced on the Super Bowl stage to her new song “Formation,” flanked by backup dancers dressed like Black Panthers. Controversy ensued, foreshadowing the great war over woke that would dominate for years to come.

This year, another vibe shift. The NFL changed the message stenciled into the end zone from “End Racism” to “Choose Love.” Trump showed up—the first sitting president to do so—and his favorite patriotic walk-on song, “God Bless the USA,” was heard playing in the stadium. Kendrick Lamar’s halftime performance featured a nagging Uncle Sam character (played by Samuel L. Jackson) who told the rapper not to be “too ghetto,” but when backup dancers dressed in red, white, and blue formed the American flag, it felt more patriotic than political, even though his song “Alright” is perhaps best known as BLM’s unofficial anthem. And in another patriotic move, Kendrick performed “Not Like Us,” his Grammy Award–winning diss track against one of America’s new trade war enemies—Canadian rapper Drake.

Speaking of Canada, even the ads couldn’t escape the vibe shift. In the wake of Trump’s proposed, but currently delayed, 25 percent tariffs against Canadian goods, the province of Ontario ran an ad reminding Americans that Canucks are important trade partners and good neighbors, eh bud?

Speaking of “bud,” Bud Light launched a new ad to convince America they aren’t woke anymore. Still reeling from its disastrous 2023 campaign with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, which spurred an effective conservative boycott, the beer’s new commercial featured Peyton Manning, Post Malone, and Shane Gillis—a comic who was infamously fired from Saturday Night Live in 2019 for affecting a Chinese accent on a podcast. (Read Anson Frericks’ great essay on the Bud Light saga.)

Bud Light wasn’t the only company with a subtle rebrand. After a backlash last year over their support for trans women participating in female sports, Nike launched a new ad putting female athletes front and center. The tagline: You can’t win, so win. Well, maybe they can’t win because they’re competing against biological males, Nike. Still, the ad is about female sports and features only female athletes, which is radical conservatism by Nike’s standards.

And the least subtle rebrand of all? Hardee’s—or, for some reason, Carl’s Jr., if you’re west of the Mississippi—brought back its sexy bikini ads after ditching them eight years ago. The real MAHA? Make America Horny Again.

Defending USAID Is Political Suicide for Democrats

On Friday, a judge temporarily blocked Musk and Trump’s plans to put 2,200 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) staffers on paid leave, in response to a lawsuit brought by two unions. The judge also reinstated 500 employees who had already been placed on leave. The order will remain in effect until midnight on Valentine’s Day, and the judge will also consider a request for a longer-term pause at a hearing on Wednesday. The unions argued that the government was violating the Constitution and harming workers by taking them out of their jobs.

Unions and judges aren’t the only ones trying to stand in the way of Musk and Trump’s plans for USAID. Congressional Democrats have suddenly become USAID’s greatest defenders, leading a rally in Washington to protect the agency.

The D.C. crowd may have cheered them on but the rest of the country won’t, says Free Press columnist Ruy Teixeira. He points out that most Americans agree that the U.S. spends too much money on foreign aid, and the working class is particularly skeptical of foreign handouts. In their rush to shoot down Musk, have Democrats aimed the gun at their own feet?

Read Ruy’s new column, “Defending USAID Is Political Suicide for Democrats.”

Cancel a Subscription, Win a Subscription

This week, one mysterious and presumably wealthy reader is offering free FP subscriptions to readers who prove that they unsubscribed from a legacy media outlet. That’s right. That means free podcasts, free TGIF, and free access to a backlog of God-only-knows-how-many articles. Send proof to tgif@thefp.com, and do it fast: You have to be one of the first 100 entrants to win. What counts as “legacy media”? Use your judgment: The New York Times certainly counts. Paying for articles on CNN.com for some reason? That counts. Cosmo too. The Washington Post? Absolutely. How much more money does Bezos really need? Highlights magazine is an edge case but if you can make the argument, we’re all ears. Happy unsubscribing!

Tyler Cowen: Why Trump Is Flooding the Zone

The first month of the Trump administration has been a whirlwind: dozens of executive actions on everything from DEI to birthright citizenship; short-lived trade wars; massive restructuring of the federal bureaucracy; and so many Truth Social posts. His latest move? Signing a proclamation making February 9 the first Gulf of America Day while aboard Air Force One flying over said Gulf en route to the Super Bowl. It all seems so chaotic—even those of us who are paid to keep up with it all barely can. But is there a method to the madness? Economist, polymath, and podcaster Tyler Cowen says yes.

Read his latest article, “A Unified Theory of Trump’s Hyperactive Start.”

How American Educators Are Conning Kids

The state of America’s public education is bleak: U.S. students are further behind in reading and math than they were in 2012. American kids in the bottom 10th and 25th percentiles are performing worse than they did in the early 1990s, and the “achievement gap” between our highest- and lowest-performing students is now one of the worst in the developed world. In a shocking new report, Free Press journalist Frannie Block writes that instead of solving the problem, educators in a number of states are covering it up.

Read Frannie on “How American Educators are Conning Kids.”

In other Frannie Block education news, her reporting on Qatari influence in American education was cited in Congressional testimony last week.

Can the FAA Be Fixed?

The shocking midair collision above the Potomac last month has prompted many to ask whether America’s air-traffic control system needs reform. The answer, writes John Tierney, is yes—and urgently. He describes an outdated system that still uses paper and pen instead of infrared and high-resolution cameras. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency that oversees America’s skies, has delayed modernization for decades. Will this crash provide the impetus for long-overdue reform?

Read John Tierney: “America’s Air-Traffic Control System Is an International Disgrace.

(Olivier Douliery via Getty Images)
  • A new CBS/YouGov survey found Trump has a positive approval rating across all age groups—with younger voters particularly enthused. The poll found 53 percent of voters approve of the overall job Trump is doing—a higher level of approval than he ever reached during his first term.

  • On Friday, Trump backed DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts and said Elon would be heading to the Pentagon next, causing shares of defense stocks like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to tumble. Yesterday, Trump predicted that his administration will find “billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” at the Defense Department. Yeah, probably. But it’s still unclear whether or not cuts will be possible. Elon’s potential role in searching the Pentagon has already raised conflict of interest concerns, given that his companies SpaceX and Starlink have contracts with the government. Plus, there is an open constitutional question about the administration’s ability to stop funds already appropriated by Congress.

  • Then, early Saturday morning a federal judge blocked DOGE’s access to Treasury records and payment systems, and ordered the Trump advisory board to destroy any material they’ve already downloaded. The ruling was the result of a suit brought by 19 Democratic state attorneys general who say that giving Musk and his team access to Treasury data puts Americans’ private information at risk. Musk says that the judge who ruled against DOGE should be impeached.

  • Trump ruled out deporting Prince Harry on Friday during an interview with the New York Post, saying “he’s got enough problems with his wife. She’s terrible.” He went on to say that he believes the prince is “whipped” by his American wife, former actress Meghan Markle. It’s part of a long-running feud: The Duchess of Sussex called him “divisive” and “misogynistic” during his 2016 presidential run, and Trump has since repeatedly criticized the couple over their reported disagreements with the royal family.

  • The CDC says nearly 100 people became sick with an unspecified gastrointestinal illness on board a Royal Caribbean cruise ship. The maritime cesspool left Tampa on February 1 en route to Mexico, Honduras, and Belize, before returning to port Saturday. It’s the sixth disease outbreak the CDC has recorded on a cruise this year. Disease-ridden, numerous, and rat-like as they scurry about from port to port, cruise ships are the vermin of the sea and it’s high time we called an exterminator! Clean them up!

 

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February 9, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

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On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”

In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.

The United States Constitution that establishes the framework for our democratic government sets out how the American people will write the laws that govern us. We elect members to a Congress, which consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That congress of our representatives holds “all legislative powers”; that is, Congress alone has the right to make laws. It alone has the power to levy taxes on the American people, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, declare war, “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.”

After Congress writes, debates, and passes a measure, the Constitution establishes that it goes to the president, who is also elected, through “electors,” by the people. The president can either sign a measure into law or veto it, returning it to Congress where members can either repass it over his veto or rewrite it. But once a law is on the books, the president must enforce it. The men who framed the Constitution wrote that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When President Richard Nixon tried to alter laws passed by Congress by withholding the funding Congress had appropriated to put them into effect, Congress shut that down quickly, passing a law explicitly making such “impoundment” illegal.

Since the Supreme Court’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, the federal courts have taken on the duty of “judicial review,” the process of determining whether a law falls within the rules of the Constitution.

Right now, the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. They have the power to change any laws they want to change according to the formula Americans have used since 1789 when the Constitution went into effect.

But they are not doing that. Instead, officials in the Trump administration, as well as billionaire Elon Musk— who put $290 million into electing Trump and Republicans, and whose actual role in the government remains unclear— are making unilateral changes to programs established by Congress. Through executive orders and announcements from Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” they have sidelined Congress, and Republicans are largely mum about the seizure of their power.

Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary.

After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans’ records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. “Outrageous,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had “the feel of…a judicial” coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it “[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state.”

Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: “Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are ‘legitimate’ can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.” Of Vance’s statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”

The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk’s participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have “a lot” of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.

Trump’s MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.

Musk and MAGA officials claim they are combating waste and fraud, but in fact, when Judge Carl Nichols stopped Trump from shutting down USAID, he specifically said that government lawyers had offered no support for that argument in court. Indeed, the U.S. government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that audits, evaluates and investigates government programs for Congress. In 2023 the GAO returned about $84 for every $1 invested in it, in addition to suggesting improvements across the government.

Until Trump fired 18 of them when he took office, major departments also had their own independent inspectors general, charged with preventing and detecting fraud, waste, abuse, misconduct, and mismanagement in the government and promoting economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in government operations and programs.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation also investigates corruption, including that committed by healthcare providers.

According to Musk’s own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk’s companies.

But Trump has been gutting congressional oversight, apparently wanting to make sure that no one can oversee the president. Rather than rooting out waste and corruption in the government, Musk and his ilk have launched a hostile takeover to turn the United States of America into a business that will return huge profits to those leaders who, in the process of moving fast and breaking things, are placing themselves at the center of the lives of 332 million people. Breaking into the U.S. Treasury payment system puts Musk and his DOGE team at the head of the country’s nerve center.

The vision they are enacting rips predictability, as well as economic security, away from farmers, who are already protesting the loss of their markets with the attempted destruction of USAID. It hurts the states—especially Republican-dominated states—that depend on funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education. Their vision excludes consumers, who are set to lose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as protections put in place by President Joe Biden. Their vision takes away protections for racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, as well as from women, and kills funding for the programs that protect all of us, such as cancer research and hospitals.

Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.

But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.

The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.

The people who think that bearing arms is central to maintaining American rights are the same people who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election by storming the United States Capitol because they do not command the votes to put their policies in place through the exercise of law outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/protecting-second-amendment-rights-7b90/

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/09/trump-courts-block-early-agenda-00203230

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/07/judge-blocks-trump-administration-plan-usaid-workers-leave-00203205

https://www.gao.gov/press-release/gaos-work-yields-70.4-billion-savings-federal-government-fy23

https://oig.ftc.gov/what-you-need-know-about-office-inspector-general

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econtoplines_c1AfT3R.pdf

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5129353-gop-support-for-musk-influence-with-trump-falls-dramatically-poll/

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/bama-senator-howls-like-stuck-pig-after-she-sees-nih-cuts-impact-in-state

Bluesky:

donmoyn.bsky.social/post/3lhpxjdo6gk2y

atrupar.com/post/3lhrce37puk2l

joshtpm.bsky.social/post/3lhr2d6nuck2f

X:

steve_vladeck/status/1888581987532788100

AaronBlake/status/1888582415137780065

emptywheel/status/1888616052004946080

Msdesignerlady/status/1888356802028585190

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