Grifting
The unveiling of the USAID’s scandalous misappropriation of money continues. This week, MSNBC tried to toss a lifesaver to Stacey Abrams, asking her to explain the $2 billion allotted to her pop-up nonprofit by the EPA when she lacked all experience for managing so much money. Didn’t work. In fact, her own words underscore that this was a Democrat party grift. She claimed it was to be used to buy energy-saving appliances for people who could not otherwise afford them. In other words, a new, more expensive remake of the Obama phone giveaway. Imagine how Stacey would allocate this pelf. Then ask yourself why taxpayers should buy appliances for and from Stacey’s friends and supporters, which in the end cost more than they save in energy costs. And if you think that makes sense, ask why the EPA didn’t cut out the middle(wo)man and offer rebates directly?
This grift was of a piece with even larger grifts exposed by the Administration.
12 billion dollars was allocated to the Navy for submarines and not one submarine was built. 42.5 billion dollars was allocated to hook people up to high-speed Internet, and not one single person was hooked up to high-speed Internet. 7.5 billion dollars was allocated to build EV charging stations. Only 37 stations were built. That’s 200 million per charging station. Where is the rest of the money?
Just as the details of the Democrats’ financial rape of taxpayers is daily exposed, their “party of kindness” pitch evaporated during the President’s joint address to both houses of Congress this week.
Resisting
Even Monica Hesse, a Washington Post resistance fan, had trouble with what she saw.
It might have been when several dozen Democrats walked into Donald Trump’s Tuesday congressional address wearing coordinated shades of bubblegum, but it was definitely by the time that several dozen Democrats started waving ping-pong-sized paddles in the House chamber that I started to really worry about the resistance.
Do something! approximately half of America had been begging these representatives. Do anything! we have cried. Democratic legislators had six weeks, after all, to strategize a strong, coherent rebuttal to the early days of Trump’s chaotic second term. You have a plan to save our republic, do you not?
As it happens, they did. “It’s time to rev up the opposition and come at Trump loud and clear,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-New Mexico), had told Time magazine earlier Tuesday. That opposition plan was: wear pink.
The color signaled “our protest of Trump’s policies which are negatively impacting women and families,” Leger Fernandez, chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, had said. Great idea. I, too, would like to protest those policies. [snip] Shortly after Trump began speaking, Democratic lawmakers began producing paddles emblazoned with tidy phrases such as “Save Medicaid,” or “Musk steals,” or, simply, “False.”
One presumes that the paddles, which members held up discreetly at sporadic intervals through the address, were intended to be pointed but also somber. But the overall effect of the whole scene was, “On our way to Barbenheimer, we were kidnapped by Sotheby’s and forced to bid on our dignity.”
These props — along with the shirts reading “RESIST” worn by some members — were simultaneously too perfunctory and too earnest. [snip] The impression that you want of your elected officials in times like this is that they know better than you. They have a serious plan for all of this. They are on the phone with one another at all hours of the night trying to figure out how to preserve this country’s rights, freedoms and rule of law. The impression you do not want is that they are on the phone with one another trying to figure out who can loan them a magenta blazer.
Nearly every person I talked to about the address — mostly liberals, I’d wager, at drop-off lines and in text chains — told me they’d cringed through Tuesday night’s address. Because Trump was up there bloviating, and because Democrats seemed to have to so little recourse. Because it wasn’t clear whether the issue was that Democrats were trying the wrong things, or, scarier, that there was actually nothing left to try.
Monica, maybe it’s just that the Democrats tying themselves to policies — government waste, men in women’ spaces, funding for Hamas — are losers and advocating for these things wouldn’t work better than bubblegum-colored jackets and bingo paddles.
The refusal of the bubblegum jacket brigade to applaud even a child cancer survivor cinched public opinion: Contrary to the theater kids’ expressed beliefs, the “party of kindness” is just a group of power seekers who lack all human perspective and care for nothing but their own selfish aims.
conduct coordinated lawfare against DOGE and Elon Musk.”
This agreement, signed less than a month after the creation of DOGE, is written in the broadest possible terms and shows that these resistance actors wasted no time in fighting the will of the American people to reduce wasteful government spending. As pointed out in the Joint Address to Congress, these states want to keep spending YOUR tax dollars on wasteful programs like:
— $22 billion from HHS to for free housing and cars for illegal aliens;
— $101 million for DEI contracts at the Department of Education;
— $45 million for DEI in Burma;
— $40 million to improve the social and economic inclusion for sedentary migrants;
— $8 million for LGBTQI+ promotion in Lesotho;
— $60 million for Indigenous peoples and Afro-Caribbean empowerment in Central America;
— $8 million for making mice transgender;
— $32 million for left-wing propaganda in Moldova;
— $10 million for male circumcision in Mozambique;
— $20 million for Arab “Sesame Street” in the Middle East;
— $59 million for illegal alien hotel rooms in NYC;
— $14 million for social cohesion in Mali;
— $42 million for social and behavioral change in Uganda;
— $14 million for improving public procurement in Serbia; and $47 million for improving learning outcomes in Asia.
@DOGE‘s work to date is just the tip of the iceberg of the billions of dollars of federal waste, fraud, and abuse. The American people voted for more responsible spending in Washington. These blue states are doing everything in their power to stand in the way.
In any event, slowly but surely, the lawfare warriors are losing. Two of the more significant cases, the freezing of USAID disbursements and the firing of special District Court judge Amy Berman’s injunctive ruling that Dellinger could not be fired from his executive office position by the Chief Executive without a showing of cause. Such a limitation is contrary to the Constitution under a 2020 Supreme Court decision (Seila Law v. CFPB). Dellinger sought to include in his case the vast number of fired probationary federal employees (thereby inadvertently showing how holdovers could use their powers to hamstring the incoming administration). Upon the lifting of the injunction and firing of Dellinger, he sought to withdraw as moot his appeal (an appeal which would consider the broader scope of presidential powers) but has not filed a motion to do so and it’s up to the Court of Appeals to treat his letter of withdrawal as sufficient to end the case. I suspect the lawfare warriors are looking for a better case in which to test executive power.
Media accounts trumpeted — wrongly — that the effort to freeze USAID disbursements by the administration had failed and suggested the money could keep pouring out to the glee or fury — depending on your inclinations — of readers. As is often true, cases of significance arise in complicated procedural contexts and this one was no different. I defer to Bill Shipley’s detailed exegesis of the case, which you may study if you want to see the litigation chessboard. Some of the claims plaintiffs made involve completed contracts as to which the District Court had no jurisdiction. (Remember Marbury v. Madison, one of the most significant of the Supreme Court decisions? There, too, in brief, the question was the right of an incoming president to ignore the appointment of an official by his predecessor. The Court found that the new President — James Madison — had no legal right to refuse Marbury’s commission, but held that it could not act on that because an act that said they could was beyond the constitutional scope of the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. The notion that a court must have specific jurisdiction of the matter before it is so fundamental that in American courts, defendants may (unlike other defenses) raise it at any time in the proceeding to preserve that right.)
Those cases involving completed contracts are exclusively within the jurisdiction of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. And as the District Court on remand plows through all the claims, certainly those will be dropped from the case. The Supreme Court ordered the inexperienced Judge Ali to review each claim to individually clarify what the Administration must do — and it’s not just pay everyone — and, further, that he must take into consideration the mechanics involved. In any event, both the District Court and Appellate Court are on notice that four justices of the Supreme Court likely will find the lower court to have overstepped.
Much teeth gnashing on the Right was occasioned by a fiery dissent written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by three conservative members of the court, who wanted immediately to dismiss the case because the district court’s lack of jurisdiction. But that anguish may be unwarranted.
The Court’s weapon is brains, not brawn. And if we stop to read the Court’s order, we find it slyly pulled Ali’s fangs, pushed him onto procedural quicksand, and invited Trump to appeal again as soon as Ali overreaches. Despite corporate media’s fondest wish, this was not a ‘whee! Trump just lost!’ moment.
It was a temporary strategic defeat teeing up a win. I’ll prove it.
The brief order included one long sentence that threw Trump several lifelines. Since, given all the conservative black-pilled hysteria over the decision, my analysis will be considered controversial, let’s carefully examine the order’s text:
Every single word has meaning. “The deadline in the challenged order has now passed” reinforced that Trump is no longer under any deadline at all. It’s gone. Judge Ali must now issue a new order setting a new deadline, all in the context of the looming March 10th date when his TRO expires four days from now. Ali’s new deadline-resetting order could be appealed again.
More significantly, Judge Ali must soon hold a full preliminary injunction hearing, providing even more opportunities for Trump to appeal — this time on the merits, such as on his argument for sovereign immunity (strongly endorsed in the Dissent), rather than appealing on much weaker procedural grounds.
Second, the Majority said “the District Court should clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill.” In other words, the Court, in effect, partially granted Trump’s appeal. The phrase suggested that Judge Ali’s original order requiring the government to pay all the contracts by midnight was simply too broad and lacked a good reason. [snip]
The third requirement, that Ali’s next order must include “due regard for the feasibility of any compliance deadlines,” means that the Court told Judge Ali, “no more same-day deadlines.” [snip]
By issuing a conditional order rather than outright overruling the TRO, the Court wins at least two ways. First, overruling the TRO required changing the law to the Court’s detriment. TRO’s are normally considered unappealable. This rule significantly reduces the work all federal appellate courts have to do, and normally it isn’t a big deal, because TRO’s are intended to be of very limited scope and duration.
If the Court did change the non-appealability rule for President Trump, it would create precedent, it would be much more controversial, and it would create LOTS more future work for itself and for the Circuits. [snip]
With a single scalpel-sharp sentence, the one-page order stripped Ali of any realistic way to revive his pay-now order — without either violating the Court’s conditions or tripping another appeal.
Here is where the Dissent’s hammer struck the Majority’s nail. We’ll now answer your second question — if the Majority order actually helped Trump without helping him, why was the Dissent so harshly written?
I’d hoped you’d ask that.
Supreme Court [certiorari ] — its agreement to hear a case — needs four Justices. In this case, fully four (4) Justices signed the barn-burning dissent that was seven times longer than the Majority opinion itself. This was a signal to Judge Ali roughly comparable to a baseball bat with the word “stop” painted on the end. The muscular Dissent signaled that, if Judge Ali strays even a little over the line, Trump will be right back in front of the Supremes, tout de suite, courtesy of the furious four.
Furthermore, with the current 5-4 split, and with four already fired up, even inexperienced Judge Ali knows he has zero margin for error — he’s riding a banana peel down a razor’s edge. If he stretches at all, such as by short-shrifting any of the Majority’s three requirements, and loses a single judge — either Roberts or Coney Barrett — he’ll be a dead skunk.
To be perfectly clear: my best guess, reading this order, is that all six conservative Justices were working together, and were not, actually, at odds. [snip]
While the Dissent appeared to be talking to the Majority, it was actually talking about Judge Ali — and to him. Ali now faces four angry Justices who are ready to drop the hammer.
So, don’t engage with the hot takes. Patience, grasshopper. Don’t start yelling for the other shoe to drop. If anything, the Court just tied Judge Ali’s shoelaces together.
Not a bad week for the Administration which has, inter alia, gelded his domestic opposition, the UN, WHO, and the WEF, forced Trudeau into retirement, and exposed the EU as a collection of toothless poseurs.
Image: Michael Ramirez
Jesus Christ is King
