#Constitutional Crisis

[tomorrowusa]

« If Mr. Trump continues to attempt to usurp the authority of the courts, the battle will be joined, and it will be up to the Supreme Court, Congress and the American people to step forward and say: Enough. As the Declaration of Independence said, referring to King George III of Britain, “A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Mr. Trump appears to have forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War to secure their independence from the British monarchy and establish a government of laws, not of men, so that Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. »

— Retired conservative Federal Judge J. Michael Luttig writing in the New York Times (archived).

Judge Luttig served in the federal judiciary from 1991 to 2006. He cannot be described as a "Radical Left Lunatic" which is how The Orange One refers to any judge who rules against Trump's unconstitutional measures. Judge Luttig was appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1991.

Trump seems eager to provoke a constitutional crisis. He is depending on slim GOP majorities in both chambers of Congress to back him up. Craven Republicans on Capitol Hill worry themselves shitless about Trump unleashing primary challengers against them. But federal judges are appointed for life and are not subject to such pressure.

Judge Luttig, albeit indirectly, considers Trump as "unfit to be the ruler of a free people". Well stated.

[lavenderebel]

Trump Triggers Constitutional Crisis With Latest Temper Tantrum

Fucking christ this is frightening! This is bullshit! They NEVER should've granted this fucker immunity! Now look where the fuck we are!

Get rid of pardons. Completely. Or at least, put some limits or something on them, like pardons have to be voted on or something?! This is BAD! This is very fucking BAD!

[labelleizzy]

It's important to know what is going on.

Written by US Senator Chris Murphy (D - CT)

Report from the Senate Floor:

Last night in the Senate, something really important happened. Republicans forced us to debate their billionaire bailout budget framework. We started voting at 6 PM because they knew doing it in the dark of night would minimize media coverage. And they do not want the American people to see how blatant their handover of our government to the billionaire class is.

So I want to explain what happened last night and what we did to fight back. The apex of Republicans’ plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on. Popular and necessary programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, are all being targeted.

In order to pass the tax cut, Republicans have to go through a series of procedural steps. Last night, they took the first step which requires them to pass an outline of their plan, but with it, any senator can offer as many amendments as we want. So my Democratic colleagues and I did just that.

Now, we knew that Republicans would largely unanimously oppose them, but we had two objectives here. One, Republicans were forced to put their opinion on record — many for the first time — on the most corrupt parts of Trump and Musk’s agenda. Two, as I’ve been saying, I am going to make every process and procedure as slow and painful as possible for as long as my colleagues choose to ignore the constitutional crisis happening before our eyes.

So what did we propose? We proposed no tax cuts for anyone who makes a billion dollars a year. We made them vote on whether or not Elon Musk and DOGE should have limitless access to Americans’ personal data. We made them vote on whether to protect IVF and require insurers to cover it. Every single amendment Democrats proposed was shot down. On almost every single amendment, Republicans universally opposed it. Every Republican voted against our proposal to prevent more tax cuts for billionaires. The corruption and theft is happening in the open here.

The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires — even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children. They know what they are doing is deeply unpopular. They are offering a tax cut to the most wealthy that is 850 times larger than what they are offering working people. Oh and by the way, any tax cuts for working people are going to be washed out by higher costs for basic necessities, like health care and food. It’s a fundamental injustice.

Thanks to your pressure and support, many of my Democratic colleagues have joined my effort to do everything we can to make sure they cannot destroy democracy and steal your money in the dark of the night. We are being loud about what is happening. I’m going to continue to grind the gears of Congress down as much as possible to make it that much harder and slower to get away with this corruption. That’s why the votes lasted until nearly 5 AM.

This is a five-alarm fire. I don’t think we have two years to plan and fight back. I think we have months. It’s still in our power to stop the destruction of our democracy with mass mobilization and effective opposition from elected officials. So we can’t miss any opportunity to take advantage of opportunities to put Republicans on the record and shine a light on what is happening.

And you have a role to play in this as well. I need you to amplify what’s happening, support the leaders who are fighting for you to make sure they can continue speaking truth to power against Musk and Trump’s billionaire cronies, and show up at rallies and town halls. Use every tool at your disposal to send a message loud and clear about how you expect my colleagues to lead and fight in this moment.

Every best wish,

US Senator Chris Murphy (D - CT)

[destiel-news-network]

(Source)

Vance wrongly said that "judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power." He is ignoring the system of checks & balances set up between the co-equal branches of government.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Trump’s Tiktok two-step is a lesson for future presidents

I'm about to leave for a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me on Feb 14 in BOSTON for FREE at BOSKONE , and on Feb 15 for a virtual event with YANIS VAROUFAKIS. More tour dates here.

Remember the Tiktok ban? I know, it was ten million years ago (in Musk years, anyway), so it may have slipped your mind, but let me remind you: Congress passed a law saying Tiktok was banned. Trump said he wouldn't enforce the law. The end.

No, really. I mean, sure, there's a bunch of bullshit about whether Trump will pick up the ban again after Tiktok's grace period ends, depending on whether they sell themselves to his creepy wax museum pal Larry Ellison. Maybe he will. Maybe Tiktok'll buy so many trumpcoins that he forgets about. Whatevs.

The important thing here is: Congress passed a (stupid) law and Trump said, "I've decided not to enforce that law" and then that was it:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-01-31-trump-administration-test-supreme-court-tiktok/

Sure, there's some big rule of law/checks and balances/separation of powers problems here, and there are plenty of laws I'm mad about Trump not enforcing (like the law that says corporations can't bribe foreign governments, say). But this one? Sure, it's fine. The problem with Tiktok is that it invades our privacy in creepy ways, not that it is owned by a Chinese company. I don't want Zuck or Musk or (especially) Trump invading my privacy.

Congress hasn't passed a consumer privacy law since 1988, when they banned video store clerks from telling newspapers about your VHS viewing habits. That's why Tiktok is a problem. Pass that law, and if any president decides not to enforce it, I'll be mad as hell and I'll be right there in the streets next to you, in head-to-toe CV dazzle, with all my distraction rectangles in Faraday pouches, shlepping a placard bearing the Social Security Numbers of every Cabinet member in giant writing.

But the point is, the president defied Congress, which is a thing that Very Serious Grownups told us radicals Joe Biden mustn't do under any circumstances, lest the resulting constitutional crisis tear the country apart, or, at the very least, alienate so many voters that Donald Trump would become the next president.

We let Very Serious Grownups call the shots, and Donald Trump is president. Maybe we should stop listening to Very Serious Grownups?

Look, presidents ignore Congress's laws all the time. The Comstock Act (which effectively bans transporting pornography and contraception) is almost entirely ignored, and has been for generations (though Trump's creepy Heritage Foundation puppetmasters have promised to bring it back). The Robinson-Patman Act hasn't been enforced since the Reagan years, which is a damned shame, because Robinson-Patman would put Walmart, Amazon, Dollartree and Dollar General out of business (Biden started to enforce Robinson-Patman again during his last year in office):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities

I'm not trying to say that enforcing (or ignoring) the Comstock Act is the same as ignoring (or enforcing) the Robinson-Patman Act. The Comstock Act is bad, and the Robinson-Patman Act is good. I am capable of making that moral judgment, and I would like to have a president who does the same.

The fear about Trump ignoring the laws and procedures is justified, but not because of the damage he's doing to laws and procedures – it's because of the damage he's doing to the people of this country and the world.

Take the records that Trump has destroyed – vital data about public health and other subjects (thankfully, most of this was saved from destruction by the Internet Archive). The most important fact about that act of destruction is the harm that will result from it, not the failure to follow procedure.

There are plenty of times in which I am OK with people ignoring the law and destroying records. In 1943, Dutch guerrillas bombed the civil registry building in Amsterdam, to keep the records of where Jews and other disfavored minorities lived out of the hands of occupying Nazis. The firefighters on the scene kept their hoses running until any paper that hadn't been burned was reduced to slurry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1943_Amsterdam_civil_registry_office_bombing

I'm fine with destroying records that wicked, vicious authoritarians would use to harm my neighbors.

Remember when Biden tried to cancel student debt? He could have started off by destroying the records of who owed what, so when the courts overturned his administrative action, it would have been hard or impossible to collect on the debts that were still held on federal books, or whose records the feds had (no, I'm not suggesting that Nazi death camp deportations are equivalent to unjust student debt collections, but if you agree that sometimes it's OK to illegally destroy records, then all we're left with is haggling over the specifics).

Sure, this would have been a constitutional crisis, but, as Ryan Grim says, "It is apparently unconstitutional for the president to instruct the Department of Education to restructure and forgive some student loan debt but it is ok for DOGE chair Elon Musk to just get rid of the whole department. Anywho."

https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1888973174819164663?t=Cd8fl4FWjY5zsOlQWZGv4g

Canceling debt isn't forgiving debt. Student borrowers have been preyed upon by colleges and lenders. People who borrowed $79.000 and paid back $190,000 can somehow still owe $236,000 do not need to be forgiven, because (unlike Trump) they haven't sinned. Rather, their debts need to be canceled (like Trump):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt

Trump's shown us what a president should do when the courts get in their way: fight back. Worst case scenario is the court prevails, and a bunch of Fedsoc judges (up to and including the Supreme Court) set binding precedent that reduces the power of the president, which would be, you know, great. Best case scenario: Americans are freed from these crippling, fraudulent debts and, you know, vote for Democrats and against Trump, instead of staying home because they don't feel like the Democrats have their back.

Defying unjust court decisions isn't Trumpian – it's Rooseveltian. Roosevelt (following in Lincoln's footsteps) spent years discrediting and weakening the Supreme Court's power, using his bully pulpit to rob them of authority and build the political will to pack the court, which he was on the brink of doing when the Supreme Court surrendered:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/20/judicial-equilibria/#pack-the-court

Democrats developed an online organizing playbook, and it worked, so Republicans took it, improved on it, and won elections. Republicans have developed a devastatingly effective constitutional hardball playbook. Democrats should steal that playbook and run with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/18/states-rights/#cold-civil-war

I rang doorbells, made phone calls, and shelled out money for Democrats in the last cycle because I wanted them to do stuff that helps Americans, not because I wanted them to follow procedures. The fact that Trump is building offshore concentration camps and has deported our neighbors to them (to name just one of many cheap dystopian fanfics that Trump is LARPing) should be the kind of five-alarm fire that sent South Korean lawmakers scaling the barricades last month.

This is the kind of crisis where I'd expect Democrats on the Hill, at a minimum, to be refusing to give Trump and the GOP anything. Call quorum on every vote. Debate every amendment. Raise every objection. Vote against everyting. Do not confirm a single appointee. And any elected Dem that refuses to play along? Kick 'em out of the caucus. Oh, we can't afford to do that because we can't afford to lose a single lawmaker? How did that work out with Kirsten Synema and Joe Manchin? Shoulda kicked them out after the first vote, shoulda raised money for any real Dem willing to primary them. Should have shunned them in the hallways and refused to invite them to the Christmas parties. We should do that to Fetterman. Party unity got us nothing under Biden. Party unity got us Trump. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome isn't actually the formal definition of insanity, but it is nevertheless very, very stupid.

For the past four years, Very Serious Grownups in the Democratic machine kept telling us that we couldn't expect the president to do anything, or Congress to do anything, or the Senate to do anything, because the Republicans would stop them. Or the courts would stop them. Why fight when you know you're gonna lose? Because sometimes, you'll win. And even if you lose, you'll go down fighting.

Better yet, if you lose in just the right way, you'll force Trump's judges to take away powers from the President and the administrative agencies – take away the powers Trump is now wielding like a sledgehammer.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/11/you-and-what-army/#student-debt

[corporationsarepeople]

[magess]

Trump ordered federal agencies to stop spending money that Congress passed laws to spend.

HE DOESN'T HAVE THE POWER TO DO THAT. Presidents are required by law to spend the money Congress approves. And Congress is the only branch allowed to approve spending.

THE AGENCIES ARE LISTENING ANYWAY. Possibly because no one is telling them that they don't have to. Possibly because no Democrats have decided to lead on this issue.

Trump wants this to go to court so SCOTUS can claim he has this power because they don't like the Constitution either.

This is a legit, actual Constitutional Crisis. If he can just do this, there's not really a point to having a Congress.

Dems are going to workshop their carefully worded reply to death rather than be pissed about it.

BE PISSED ABOUT THIS!

Call your congresspeople! Call you governor! The money being frozen was promised to your state!

Calling is scary, BUT, if you call at night, you will probably just get a voicemail, so you can leave a message without speaking to anyone. DO THAT.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Margaret Sullivan at American Crisis:

Jamelle Bouie gets it. The New York Times columnist wrote something a few days ago that stood out to me because it was so directly stated and so horrifyingly correct. It began: “Even if anyone had elected Elon Musk to anything, the past week would still be one of the most serious examples of executive branch malfeasance in American history.” Bouie went on: “Musk has seized hold of critical levers of power and authority within the federal government, apparently enabling him to destroy federal agencies at will, barring congressional action or judicial pushback.” The piece was titled, “There is No Going Back.” Here’s a gift link. Read it in full and weep for what we’re losing, day by day. But Bouie’s sense of alarm, well founded as it is, is strangely rare in Big Journalism these days. Witness, for example, a piece last week by Jason Willick, a regular opinion columnist at the Washington Post, who wrote something titled “Save the panic over Trump’s ‘power grabs.’ It might be needed later.” Calm down, Willick counseled, mocking the idea that a coup is underway, and concludes that, instead of having what he calls a “meltdown,” everyone should just wait and see. Why? Because, he argues, casting Trump and Musk’s early moves as a constitutional crisis “will diminish the force of such warnings if they are needed.” Willick was appropriately blasted in the reader-comments section: “This sycophantic, willfully delusional apologia for the dismantling of the American republic and the shredding of the constitution … is contemptible sophistry of the very worst kind,” said one. Read Willick’s column, if you have the stomach, and judge for yourself; here’s a gift link. Overall, the tone in the major media is much more like Willick than Bouie. For example, the popular Times newsletter, The Morning, offered this tepid headline one day last week: “A Constitutional Crisis?” Then it considered the question from various angles, including only one quote from a lawmaker — Republican senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina who notes that what Trump and Musk are doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,” but “nobody should bellyache about that.” As Jamelle Bouie put it in the column I mentioned above, no question mark is appropriate here. In fact, calling what’s happening a constitutional crisis “does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy.”

[...] Righteous indignation like that is hard to come by. That’s why I wrote a Guardian column last week about two new-generation Democrats who have become strong voices: Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Texas and Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. I quoted political consultant Sawyer Hackett: “There’s been no better messenger in the first two weeks of Trump 2.0 than Chris Murphy. At a time when too many Democrats are afraid of their shadow, Murphy is showing how to fight back with a compelling populist message that should be a blueprint for the Democrats moving forward.” My Guardian editor asked me to include a paragraph at the end about what’s giving me hope right now. You can read that, and the rest of the column, here.

Margaret Sullivan is spot-on: Our press needs righteous truth-telling during these constitutional crisis times.

[porterdavis]

[saywhat-politics]

I do not feel comfortable knowing that this Supreme Court is the last thing standing between us and full blown constitutional crisis.

[thoughtportal]

Can we protect Minnesotans from the federal government

[davidaugust]

via (at)realalexcole.bsky.social

[republicansaretheproblem]

🆘

[aibidil]

Trump administration not following court orders—what now?

If you're not paying too close attention to what's happening in the US government right now (good for you, we all need to protect our mental states), the important thing to know right now is:

Federal courts are working overtime to halt Trump's illegal executive orders and the actions of Trump/Musk. There have been multiple court orders to stop him.

This is how the system is supposed to work. Check out these updates from the NC Attorney General Jeff Jackson, one of the democratic attorneys general doing god's work right now:

But now we come to the fun (not fun) part: the Trump admin isn't following the court orders. This is simply not something presidents do. One article I read said it hasn't happened since the Civil War. So what happens now?

Example: Trump ordered a spending freeze on federal grants. A federal judge ruled on January 29 that Trump can't simply stop the dispursal of funds that Congress has already authorized. (In the US, Congress has the sole constitutional authority to authorize spending, and these funds have already been approved.) In the ruling, the judge ordered Trump to release the funds. Weeks have passed and the funds haven't been released. Yesterday (Feb 10, 2025), the judge issued a follow-up ruling ordering Trump to comply with his previous ruling. The judge didn't find the administration in contempt of court—which is likely the next step—but stated unequivocally that they were not following his order of January 29 despite it being within their power to do so.

Even before this ruling, Vice President Vance (ew I can't believe I just typed that) ominously posted on Twitter:

The fact that he's wrong (it's the basic checks and balances American kids learn in civics, and it's Marbury v Madison) is unimportant. What's important is that he's setting the stage for the Trump admin to deny that the courts can constrain their actions.

This is the "constitutional crisis" people keep referring to. The law/Constitution means nothing if it's ignored. And when it's ignored, it's the job of the courts to call that out and issue orders to stop the unlawful/unconstitutional action. But if they don't listen to the orders..... What next? There's no clear answer. It doesn't seem likely that the military will enforce the federal courts' orders against Trump, does it?

This is such a breakdown of the rule of law that the American Bar Association issued this statement yesterday:

[corporationsarepeople]

In times like these, listen to the historians:

In the logic of destruction, there is no need to rebuild afterwards. In this chaos, the oligarchs will tell us that there is no choice but to have a strong man in charge. It can be a befuddled Trump signing ever larger pieces of paper for the cameras, or a conniving Vance who, unlike Trump, has always known the plot. Or someone else.

After we are all poor and isolated, the logic goes, we will be consoled by the thought that there is at least a human being to whom we can appeal. We will settle for a kind of anthropological minimum, wishful contact with the strong man. As in Russia, pathetic video selfies sent to the Leader will be the extent of politics.

For the men currently pillaging the federal government, the data from those video selfies is more important than the people who will make them. The new world they imagine is not just anti-American but anti-human. The people are just data, means to the end of accumulating wealth.

They see themselves as the servants of the freedom of the chosen few, but in fact they are possessed, like millennia of tyrants before them, of fantastic dreams: they will live forever, they will go to Mars. None of that will happen; they will die here on Earth, with the rest of us, their only legacy, if we let it happen, one of ruins. They are god-level brainrotted.

The attempt by the oligarchs to destroy our government is illegal, unconstitutional, and more than a little mad. The people in charge, though, are very intelligent politically, and have a plan. I describe it not because it must succeed but because it must be described so that we can make it fail. This will require clarity, and speed, and coalitions. I try to capture the mood in my little book On Tyranny. Here are a few ideas.

—

Please read the rest.

[martyr-mayhem]

Federal judge Beryl A. Howell finds that Trump's firing of Marvin Kaplan, member of the National Labor Relations Board, was illegal 🥳

Next stop: Supreme Court 🚀