We begin today with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo killing two or even three birds with one stone.
... if we care about the American Republic, if we care about this country, everything we do right now has to be guided toward defeating this takeover. These aren’t one and done things. It’s complicated. It’s often incremental, albeit sometimes unfolding very fast. Gains can be reversed. In the political realm it’s almost a zero sum game with the power of the Democratic party, simply because that’s the one organized political force in the country that can contest the takeover in the political arena. You may say you’re done with the Democratic party. And fine … but if you are you’re just going to have to reassemble the more or less identical coalition under a different label. So the difference doesn’t terribly concern me.
But it’s not only politics, or more specifically it’s not only electoral politics.
A free society exists not simply because there are limits on the power of the government. The state may have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. But it does not have a monopoly on power. It’s free because there are multiple nodes of power – cultural, economic, social – in the national space. Universities are one of those. The private sector economy is another. There’s another that’s been in the news over the last week. And I’m going to discuss it here briefly because while it can seem sort of niche and on the margins it’s very far from it. It’s the nation’s ‘Big Law’ law firms. It started with an executive order targeting
Perkins Coie, a big national law firm headquartered in Seattle.
The actions against Big Law firms may end up being some of the biggest stuff happening right now. As you know, I’m far from someone who takes a lawyer-centric view of the world. But Big Law firms are a critical power node in the US system. Of course there are lots of small firms and independent operators. But that’s like saying there are small independent media outlets like TPM. They’re critical. We’re critical – and hey we’re still in our annual membership drive, so please subscribe! But you don’t want the press to reduced to be just those places. Once that’s all you’ve got civil society is on life support. The Big Law firms provide a lot of the access to the more complex and regulatory-dependent parts of the private economy and commerce. Often you really, really want one those people as your defense lawyer. If the big firms are cowed up into state subservience that’s a really, really big deal.
Nevertheless, Edward Isaac-Dovere and Annie Grayer of CNN report that elected Democrats serving within the House and the Senate are highly displeased with the Senate Minority Leader.
Schumer and the nine Democrats who voted with him on Friday say they were making the responsible decision between two horrible choices. Option one: advance a bill full of major cuts and leeway for Trump’s administration to reallocate billions of funds for their own purposes. Option two: enable a shutdown which could have stretched on indefinitely while Trump officials flexed executive authority over spending in ways they would find even more devastating, not to mention leaving tens of thousands of federal workers without pay and millions more without services.
But critics from across traditional Democratic divides of ideology, geography and age see a pile of excuses and false choices. They say Schumer flubbed weeks of strategy, essentially negotiating with himself for less to make the final bill worse than they could have gotten it to be with better pushback. They say he mismanaged dynamics internally with colleagues and publicly so that he ended up delivering a fresh round of dejection to a party already slumping on the ropes.
Any Democrat paying attention knew this week of negotiations was going to be terrible for them. But, many say, it was Schumer’s leadership that left them looking and feeling even worse—and with much less leverage for future fight, now that Senate Republicans saw how easy it was to write what Trump wants into the bills, make no effort to reach out to Democrats, and watch them be the ones to attack each other.
“Republicans saw Democrats were weak, and thought, ‘We’re going to call your bluff’—and they were right,” said a top aide to one Senate Democrat. “This was always going to be no-win. But it didn’t have to be this much of an ‘L’.”
My name is Emmett...
Lazaro Gamio and Ana Swanson of The New York Times report that Trump voters FA’d when it came to the tacky shoe salesman’s willingness to impose tariffs even before the presidential election. Now that many of those tariffs have been imposed, those same voters are about to FO.
Since Mr. Trump ordered steep levies on some of America’s largest trading partners in February and March, other countries have begun imposing their own tariffs on American exports in an attempt to put pressure on the president to relent.
The retaliatory tariffs have been carefully designed to hit Mr. Trump where it hurts: Nearly 8 million Americans work in industries targeted by the levies and the majority are Trump voters, a New York Times analysis shows.
The figures underscore the dramatic impact that a trade war could have on American workers, potentially causing Mr. Trump’s economic strategy to backfire. Mr. Trump has argued that tariffs will help boost American jobs. But economists say that retaliatory tariffs can cancel out that effect. [...]
The jobs that could be hit by retaliation are especially concentrated in pockets of the upper Midwest, South and Southeast, including many rural parts of the country that are responsible for producing agricultural goods. It also includes areas that produce coal, oil, car parts and other manufactured products.
Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian thinks that Trump is now high on his own supply.
Start with the economic vandalism, unfolding in real time and mesmerising to watch. For weeks, you could see the US stock market falling and falling until on Thursday the S&P index passed an unwanted milestone: it stood more than 10% down from the peak it had reached less than a month earlier, a fall that meets the Wall Street definition of a “correction”. In other words, even if the market eventually rallies, this is no blip.
The talk now is of a recession and you can tell that Trump himself suspects it’s coming. “I hate to predict things like that,” he said
this week. “There is a period of transition because what we’re doing is very big. We’re bringing wealth back to America … It takes a little time.” Did you catch that? The great booster, who campaigned on a promise to turn things around “on day one”, is now adopting the lotus position, talking of “transition” and urging patience. [...]
It’s bad for the country and bad for Trump politically: the people most dependent on soon-to-be gutted government help such as Medicare or Medicaid
are Trump voters. As the impact of the cuts kicks in – national parks closed during the summer, delayed benefits for veterans, a deadly accident, for example,
in an area previously safeguarded – many Americans could sour on the president who promised to make their lives better. Especially when they see him go ahead with his signature policy:
a $4.5tn tax cut that will massively benefit the very richest.
Why, then, is Trump pursuing a course of action that can only damage the country and dent his own standing? The explanation lies in the way Trump sees the world. Which is through a lens clouded by the very phenomenon he once did so much to identify: fake news.
Political science professor Philip D. Bunn writes for his “Everything Was Beautiful” Substack about the imaginary and actual aspects of being “efficient.”
If “government efficiency” alone is your goal, Nazi Germany is exemplary. This is not to make a lazy accusation of DOGE supporters or affiliates being Nazis, only to highlight that “efficiency” itself is contentless. It describes means, not ends, unless we make the mistake of mistaking our means for ends in themselves. [...]
...consider the “inefficiency” afforded to us by our Constitutional rights. The fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments provide citizens, suspects, and criminal defendants strong protections in the course of criminal investigations and trials. These protections are surely opposed to bare efficiency. It would be more efficient for police officers to be able to search whomever they want, for trials to proceed without regard for protection against self-incrimination, for convicts to have no right to an appeal, and so on. Efficiency in the criminal justice system, pursued single-mindedly, would require removing the pesky rights that slow the process and drag out cases for many months and years. [...]
All of this to say, I find the narrow focus on “government efficiency” troubling, both in principle and in practice. I recognize that “efficiency” in most people’s minds is opposed directly to “waste, fraud, and abuse” and I certainly am not defending waste and fraud. But finding and resolving issues of waste, fraud, and abuse is more properly speaking an issue of government accountability, not bare efficiency. In attempting or purporting to increase the efficiency of government, we risk eliminating things that are, despite their inefficiency, quite essential to healthy, stable government….
Do read the entire essay. It is a little bit of a heavy lift for a Sunday morning but very rewarding.
Finally today, Chris Geidner of LawDork reports on the emergency court order which temporarily stopped Trump-ordered deportations.
A little before 7:00 p.m. Saturday, a federal judge issued an order temporarily stopping deportations set in motion by President Donald Trump hours earlier when he announced that he had invoked a law last used to justify Japanese internment camps.
With planes departing nearly immediately following Trump’s announcement that he had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — planes full of people the Trump administration would be deporting with no process — Chief Judge James Boasberg said at the conclusion of a Saturday evening hearing, "I am required to act immediately."
Boasberg issued a nationwide temporary restraining order blocking removal of “all noncitizens in U.S. custody who are subject to [Trump’s order]” — people who the government decides are members of Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Venezuelan gang — for the next 14 days or until a further order from the court.
At the hearing, Boasberg added that planes in the air were to be turned around, telling the Justice Department lawyer that his clients needed to be informed of the TRO "immediately."
Try to have the best possible day, everyone!
