Actual Lawfare

 I had a couple of interesting conversations yesterday. One was with friends worried about Trump involving the Insurrection Act and turning it on Americans. The other was with our Head of School about the decision of our umbrella organization to cancel it's People of Color Conference. The basic gist of so many conversations these days is: How afraid should I/we be?

With the Insurrection Act, I actually think the risk is pretty low. Yes, he might send the army to the Mexican border, but I'm not sure that holds up to legal scrutiny. If he's claiming an "invasion" then that's not an insurrection. Sending troops to patrol the Arizona deserts is not a huge concern for me, given everything else that's going on. However, my friend was going to Mexico and wondering if they would be let back into the country. 

There are certainly anecdotes about people being harassed at customs, even US citizens. Still - at least as of this writing - citizens have rights. If Trump tries to override two and a half centuries of American rights, the Courts will tell him to fuck off. If he violates the Courts, then we could very well be in an 1859 moment. Maybe the country disintegrates. 

The thing is, you can't live in that constant tremulous fear all the time. What's more, it is that fear that constitutes their greatest weapon. They have almost zero legal standing for what they are doing. They need people to be afraid.

Which brings me to the discussion about how private schools are navigating this moment. The gist of it was that while most schools disagree with the decision to cancel the POCC, they are hoping to avoid a showdown with the limitless resources of the Federal government. Josh Marshall kind of runs through the calculations about how to fight back. It's possible, but the sheer scope of what could be over the horizon is really daunting. If you're the Sierra Club, how much money are you prepared to sink into lawyers to defend yourself against the entire Justice Department?

I get it.

However, as Paul Krugman points out, these people are fucking idiots. They are really pretty incompetent. They obscure their idiocy with violence of action, but it's still idiocy. Take the situations with Harvard. They sent the letter by mistake and then, when Harvard stood up to them, they said, actually we did mean the letter that we didn't mean to send. Elsewhere in Krugman's post, he talks about how Bessant went behind Navarro's back to get the modest reductions in tariffs. 

These people are a clown show, but because they are scary clowns people are backing away.

Universities are both some of the most vulnerable institutions to this illegal set of actions, and also, perhaps well suited to fight back.

But only if they fight back together. 

David Brooks - David Fucking Brooks - gets it.

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

This is exactly right (It's Brooks, he goes off the rails a bit at the end). The president is not sovereign; the people are. If there is a coordinated effort across all segments of American society to resist this lawlessness, then we can stop this before the midterm elections that are oh so far away.

One of the things I've been worried about is the generational damage Trump can do to the Federal workforce. The DOGE purges will weaken us as a country for years. However, at this point, I think any lawyer with respect for the rule of law needs to draw a line that they will not cross.

It would be supremely ironic if DOGE is out there crippling the government through illegal layoffs and lawyers at the DOJ crippled MAGA by resigning en masse.

If the greatest cudgel that Trump holds is the possibility of endless lawsuits, he needs a large supply of lawyers. What has become apparent from the jump is that most MAGA lawyers fall into the Alina Habba camp: manifestly incompetent. 

Harvard punching back has shown the cracks that every single bully has. If 1,000 universities band together, how will Trump react? If he order the DOJ to pursue prosecutions in violation of the law, the lawyers should resign. In fact, I'd love to see some of the phalanx of pissed of judges begin disbarment proceedings against some of the lawyers who are operating in contempt of court.

Heather Cox Richardson delivered remarks in celebration of the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride.

Paul Revere didn’t wake up on the morning of April 18, 1775, and decide to change the world. That morning began like many of the other tense days of the past year, and there was little reason to think the next two days would end as they did. Like his neighbors, Revere simply offered what he could to the cause: engraving skills, information, knowledge of a church steeple, longstanding friendships that helped to create a network. And on April 18, he and his friends set out to protect the men who were leading the fight to establish a representative government.

The work of Newman and Pulling to light the lanterns exactly 250 years ago tonight sounds even less heroic. They agreed to cross through town to light two lanterns in a church steeple. It sounds like such a very little thing to do, and yet by doing it, they risked imprisonment or even death. It was such a little thing…but it was everything. And what they did, as with so many of the little steps that lead to profound change, was largely forgotten until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used their story to inspire a later generation to work to stop tyranny in his own time.

What Newman and Pulling did was simply to honor their friendships and their principles and to do the next right thing, even if it risked their lives, even if no one ever knew. And that is all anyone can do as we work to preserve the concept of human self-determination. In that heroic struggle, most of us will be lost to history, but we will, nonetheless, move the story forward, even if just a little bit.

And once in a great while, someone will light a lantern—or even two—that will shine forth for democratic principles that are under siege, and set the world ablaze.