normative.bsky.social
He sits motionless, like a spider in the center of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. juliansanchez.com
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I mean “aristocratic” in the etymological sense, not as a shorthand for wealthy douchebags
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It would also be nice to be taller, and yet.
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Human rights defender Stefania Kapronczay watched a similar pattern play out in Hungary. Referring to attacks on academic and research institutions, she told me, "In an autocratic state, any institution that has autonomy is a trap to the government’s power." www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
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For some of those courts, at least, the realpolitik answer is “jurisprudential Cirque du Soleil in service of giving Donald Trump whatever he wants”. But if public communicators about law are fuzzy about whether that’s actually the right LEGAL answer, it feeds the permisson structure for the Cirque.
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Except that in the course of explaining the “hard news” part they end up parroting the administration’s strained legal argument for why he has this power. Maybe with one sentence noting some legal experts disagree, but just as often not.
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@normative.bsky.social @digby56.bsky.social we did numerous podcast episodes and pieces arguing over and over again that the tariffs should be looked at as a grotesque abuse of power first and foremost, and we got almost no pickup for any of it. no one wanted to hear this message, for some reason
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I’m sure the country is full of non-lawyers who’ve never specifically heard of the The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, but I don’t know what that has to do with the legitimacy of their rulings.
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Also, not strictly a legal consideration, but this feeds into the pervasive and very unhealthy attitude that court rulings & orders don’t really “count” (at least against the Trump administration) until the Supreme Court weighs in.
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Whatever putiative injury Trump suffers from being denied the authority if the panel got it wrong is exactly mirrored by the injury to Congress’ prerogatives & the plaintiffs’ interests by allowing him to keep exercising it if the panel was right. Why implicitly give one of them greater weight?
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A specialized expert judicial panel found Trump had usurped congressional power. Seems to me the default should be he doesn’t get to do it until he meets the burden of showing they were wrong, not that he gets to play Calvinball until however many months it takes to get to SCOTUS.
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And if you can get executive agencies to pretend you have sweeping authority to impose tariffs for a few months, it’s a lot easier to frame as courts “taking away” that authority when they finally hold the whole thing was an illegal power grab.
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If you dismantle a statutorily established agency like USAID, fire all the staff, and strip it for parts, you may indeed make it practically infeasible to just restart it again when the courts hold all that was illegal a month or two later.
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One of the reasons Trump 2.0 has been moving with such breakneck speed is that they understand how much power there is in establishing both the facts on the ground and the public perception of those facts before the courts can get involved.
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Via @realbenisons.bsky.social this is the sort of framing that helps explain why lots of folks online are reacting like these must be wacky liberal activists trying to take away a power “everyone knows” Congress has delegated to presidents.
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But then you read the opinion—by one Trump, one Obama, and one Reagan appointee—and it doesn't even sound like a particularly close call. Which makes it seem like a serious fumble that the modal news reader probably had no clue this was all illegal. www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/fi...
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If the story is just "Trump Pauses Tariffs" and "Trump Reimposes Tariffs" & the focus is all on the economic & diplomatic consequences, people will naturally assume these are just powers he uncontroversially has. They'd say something otherwise, right?
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And constantly pointing out "by the by, this is almost certainly illegal" feels like speculative editorializing until a judge makes it official. The trouble is that leaving that bit out, after maybe a token graf in an early story, normalizes the practices & lets readers assume it must be lawful.
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Part of the problem here is that as a *practical* matter, Trump can de facto cause all sorts of things to happen, however transparently ludicrous the claimed legal basis, until a case wends its way through the courts. So journalists just focus on what's happening in practice...
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Would the world be improved if you could snap your fingers and suddenly nobody used recreational drugs? Possibly. But until someone discovers that spell, that’s not a relevant question.
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This is, incidentally, a disease of a lot of policy thinking: We talk as though legislation or executive orders just magically alter reality, rather than thinking through the grubby logistics of humans with guns trying to make the world match the words.
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In this very narrow sense, J.D. Vance’s anti-constitutional cri de cœur was right: They ran on a policy that was clearly infeasible to carry out if they had to respect people’s constitutional rights. (Though a decent person’s takeaway would be “guess we shouldn’t have run on that, huh?”)
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NB, the MAHA “report” itself lists no staff authors, just a bunch of “commission members” who are all senior admin officials & obviously not personally drafting a 75-page heavily-footnoted document.