The Systematic Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law

In his first hours back as president, Donald J. Trump did an extraordinary thing: He made a direct assault on the Constitution. He declared that his government would no longer treat U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants or children of lawful, temporary immigrants as citizens, as the 14th Amendment commands.

You can draw a straight line from that executive order on birthright citizenship to his administration’s revocation of visas, the detention of foreign students and the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, to a Salvadoran prison and the subsequent refusal to try to extricate him in spite of court orders. Mr. Trump is claiming far-reaching but dubious powers, pushing or exceeding legal limits without first bothering to determine if they were permissible, as past presidents generally did.

Times Opinion recently reached out to dozens of legal scholars and asked them to identify the most significant unconstitutional or unlawful actions by Mr. Trump and his administration in the first 100 days of his second presidency and to assess the damage. We also asked them to separate actions that might draw legal challenges but are, in fact, within the powers of the president. And we asked them to connect the dots on where they thought Mr. Trump was heading.

We heard back from 35 scholars — a group full of diverse viewpoints and experiences, including liberals like U.C. Berkeley’s Erwin Chemerinsky and Harvard’s Jody Freeman; the conservatives Adrian Vermeule at Harvard and Michael McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge who directs Stanford’s Constitutional Law Center and is a member of the Federalist Society; and the libertarians Ilya Somin at George Mason University and Evan Bernick at Northern Illinois University. Many are among the nation’s most cited scholars by their colleagues in law review articles.

From all of their responses, we constructed a road map through Mr. Trump’s first 100 days of lawlessness, including his defiance of our judiciary and constitutional system; the undermining of First Amendment freedoms and targeting of law firms, universities, the press and other parts of civil society; the impoundment of federal funds authorized by Congress; the erosion of immigrant rights; and the drive to consolidate power.

This road map largely draws on the scholars’ words, which serve as bright red warning lights about the future of America:

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A Brief History of the Death & Funerary Rites of the Roman Papacy

I found this to be quite interesting. 

Sunday Various

In Rome the battle lines are forming for the upcoming conclave.

A list of potential papal successors from media reports

A look at some of the possible successors from Rorate with a traditionalist POV

In Canada's election, Trump is on the ballot.

Poll: Canadians despise Trump and distrust US

Shocked by US peace proposal, Ukrainians say they will not accept any formal surrender of territory

Trump's third-term talk freezes the potential 2028 Republican field

GOP Medicaid debate intensifies in search for cuts

Florida nears ban on fluoride

The NBC / MSNBC Divorce is Getting Messy

Trump is Going After Wikipedia

..As you know, Section 501(c)(3) requires that organizations receiving tax-exempt status operate exclusively for “religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes. . . [.]” It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary Wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public. Wikipedia is permitting information manipulation on its platform, including the rewriting of key, historical events and biographical information of current and previous American leaders, as well as other matters implicating the national security and the interests of the United States. Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s “educational” mission. 

In addition, Wikipedia’s operations are directed by its board that is composed primarily of foreign nationals, subverting the interests of American taxpayers. Again, educational content is directionally neutral; but information received by my Office demonstrates that Wikipedia’s informational management policies benefit foreign powers....

Read the rest here.

I saw this coming from the moment he won the election. The language is straight out of every tyrant's playbook. Attack any source of information you can't control. Start by accusing it of being a foreign propaganda entity, cut off its funding, and then shut it down. 

Trump is an Authoritarian Fool

To see the true face of Donald Trump, look no further than Ukraine. Laid bare in his handling of that issue are not only his myriad weaknesses, but also the danger he poses to his own country and the wider world – to say nothing of the battered people of Ukraine itself.

Don’t be fooled by the mild, vaguely theatrical rebuke Trump issued to Vladimir Putin on Thursday after Moscow unleashed a deadly wave of drone strikes on Kyiv, killing 12 and injuring dozens: “Vladimir, STOP!” Pay attention instead to the fact that, in the nearly 100 days since Trump took office, the US has essentially switched sides in the battle between Putin’s Russia and democratic Ukraine, backing the invaders against the invaded.

On Friday, Trump’s real-estate buddy and special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, held talks in Moscow with Putin. But any resemblance between the US and an honest broker is purely coincidental. On the contrary, previous encounters between the two men resulted in Witkoff parroting Kremlin talking points, essentially endorsing Russia’s claim to the Ukrainian territory it seized. In that, Witkoff was merely following the lead set by his boss: the supposed peace deal Trump is now in a hurry to seal amounts to handing Putin almost everything he wants and demanding Ukraine surrender.

Hence Trump’s anger on Wednesday, when he accused Volodymyr Zelenskyy of making “inflammatory statements”. What had the Ukrainian president said that was so incendiary? He had calmly pointed out that he could not do as Trump demanded and recognise Russian control of Crimea, which Russia grabbed in 2014, because it was forbidden by his country’s constitution. It’s telling that Trump should be enraged by a president who thinks constitutions have to be respected.

Whether Trump succeeds in making Kyiv buckle or not, the new reality is clear. The US president is taking an axe to an international order constructed in the aftermath of a bloody world war, a system that has held, however imperfectly, since 1945. A central tenet of that order was that big states could not simply swallow up smaller ones, that unprovoked aggression and conquest would no longer be allowed to stand. Yet here is Trump bent on rewarding just such an act of conquest, not simply acquiescing in Putin’s land grab in Ukraine but conferring on it the legitimacy of approval by the world’s most powerful nation.

Note how he speaks as if Putin had every right to seize the territory of his neighbour. Asked this week what concessions, if any, he had extracted from Moscow, Trump replied that Putin’s willingness to stop the war, rather than gobbling up Ukraine in its entirety, was a “pretty big concession”.

Read the rest here.

I can't remember ever really agreeing with Jonathan Freedland on much of anything. But he is pretty much dead on here.

The Peace Deal

Francis

Francis had many real and undoubted virtues. His love for the poor and marginalized was not a show, likewise his humility. Yet I can't help but recall Winston Churchill's damning assessment of Clement Attlee; "a humble man, with much to be humble about." 

The  hallmark of his pontificate was the elevation of religious indifference, and by extension indifference to Divine Revelation itself, to a degree that made the proclamation of anything as objectively true, a punishable offense. I honestly have more respect for Calvin and Luther who at least stood for something. At the end of the day Francis was a heretic. Who, in the course of twelve years did incalculable damage to his own church, and by example to much of Christendom. Out of charity, I shall refrain from further comment on his legacy until after the funeral. 

Hungary takes another step towards dictatorship

Just last week, Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party adopted a bill that would allow the government to temporarily strip dual citizens — specifically those who are also nationals of non-EU or non-European Economic Area countries — of their Hungarian passports, should they be deemed to have acted “in the interest of foreign powers” and “undermined the sovereignty of Hungary.” 

The ambitions of this bill are clear as day. This is not about national security; it’s about silencing dissent. It’s about targeting civil society, journalists and activists — both within Hungary and the diaspora — who refuse to fall in line with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

I’ve already been the subject of many such attacks. My name and my organization, Action for Democracy, have been fixtures of the Hungarian government’s propaganda machine for years.

The government has commissioned illegal surveillance, covertly recording videos and taking photographs of me and my family in front of our apartment in New York. It has published unfounded allegations in pro-government newspapers. It has launched misogynistic attacks against my wife. And it has instructed the Hungarian intelligence agencies, as well as the Orwellian “Sovereignty Protection Authority” — a body modeled on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s repressive state machinery — to investigate my organization on the grounds of “national security.”

Read the rest here.

The Face-Plant President

Harold Macmillan, the midcentury British prime minister, supposedly said that what statesmen feared most were “events, dear boy, events.” Misfortunes happen: a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a foreign crisis. Political leaders are judged by how adroitly or incompetently they handle the unexpected.

Luckily, the Trump administration hasn’t yet had such misfortunes. Its only misfortune — and therefore everyone else’s — is itself.

So much has been obvious again this week, thanks to two stories that are, at their core, the same. First, there was the revelation that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had shared sensitive details of the military strike on Yemen with his wife, brother and personal lawyer on yet another Signal group chat. That was followed by an essay in Politico from a former close aide to Hegseth, John Ullyot, describing a “full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon” — a meltdown that included the firing of three of the department’s top officials. Donald Trump Jr. responded by saying Ullyot is “officially exiled from our movement.”

Then there was a market rout and a dollar plunge, thanks to President Trump’s unseemly and unhinged attacks on Jerome Powell, the Fed chairman. Powell’s sin was to have the audacity to describe the probable effects of the president’s tariffs: namely, that they’ll cause prices to go up and growth to slow down. This sent Trump into a rage, complete with White House threats to examine whether Powell can be fired — a potential assault on central bank independence worthy of the worst economic days of Argentina.

Both cases are about adult supervision: the absence of it in the first instance, the presence of it in the other and the president’s strong preference for the former. Why? Probably for the same reason that tin-pot dictators elevate incompetent toadies to top security posts: They are more dependent and less of a threat. The last thing Trump wants at the Pentagon is another Jim Mattis, secure enough in himself to be willing to resign on principle.

The same goes for other departments of government.

An adult secretary of state would never have allowed his department to be gutted in its first weeks by an unofficial official (Elon Musk) from a so-called department (DOGE) by unaccountable teenage employees with nicknames like Big Balls. But Marco Rubio has a moniker with a very different meaning, Little Marco. He’ll do as he’s told right until he’s fired, probably (like one of his predecessors, Rex Tillerson) via a social media post.

Read the rest here.

Kyrie Eleison

1936-2025

Paschal Services 2025

Christ is risen!

 

A (rare) Victory for Legal Sanity

LONDON — Britain’s highest court ruled Wednesday that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex.

Trump Orders DOJ Investigation of Critics

President Donald Trump is targeting two former first-term appointees over their criticism of his actions, stripping their security clearances and opening federal probes of their tenures.

The directives that Trump signed on Wednesday order the Justice Department to scrutinize Chris Krebs, who ran Trump’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and former senior Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor.

The two critics are the latest to be swept up in Trump’s expansive retribution campaign, where he’s sought to use federal powers in unprecedented ways to punish political opponents, law firms, universities and others that he believes have wronged him.

A president ordering investigations of specific individuals whom he considers to be his political enemies is a remarkable breach of the traditional wall of separation between the White House and the Justice Department. Under that norm of separation, criminal investigations are supposed to be insulated from political pressure, but Trump has repeatedly scorned the notion of DOJ independence. Making Wednesday’s action even more remarkable, and perhaps unprecedented, is that Trump used the formal power of executive orders to effectively brand two individuals as subjects of criminal investigations.

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Bret Stephens: There’s Nothing Real About Trump’s ‘Real America’

Even by the ugly standards of this administration, the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia stands out.

A Salvadoran migrant and metal worker in Maryland with no criminal record other than traffic violations and illegal entry into the country, he was arrested by immigration authorities in March and deported to one of the notorious prisons of his homeland, in contravention of a U.S. immigration judge’s order. The government acknowledged the “administrative error” — an Orwellian euphemism for a Kafkaesque nightmare — but petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a federal judge’s order requiring his return on Monday. The same day, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the lower court’s order so it can have time to consider the case.

Abrego Garcia was an unimportant person when he was deported — except, of course, to his wife and son and two stepchildren. He is the subject of an accusation that he belonged to the MS-13 gang — but there is only flimsy evidence and no proof. The entire edifice of American justice is built on the conviction that there is no guilt without proof beyond reasonable doubt — and that there is no unimportant person, at least not in the eyes of the law.

I’ve been thinking about this case as an emblem of everything that makes Donald Trump’s presidency so vile and destructive, even when I’ve bent over backward to give him the benefit of the doubt, and even when I’ve agreed with him on this or that point of policy. I have, to borrow a line from Peggy Noonan, a “certain idea of America.” He ain’t it.

What is that “certain idea”? It has to do with a type of democratic nobility, something most of us can recognize the moment we see it. It’s Sojourner Truth asking the suffragists at the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, “Ain’t I a woman?” It’s Lou Gehrig, stricken with A.L.S. in his 30s, calling himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

...This is what feels so wholly absent today. Those of us who count as coastal elites are expected to be deferential to the “real America” that elected this administration — one that’s supposedly more in tune with the country’s spirit than the Martha’s Vineyard set. Fine, please educate us.

But I struggle to understand what’s real in JD Vance’s shape-shifting political beliefs or Trump’s meme coins. I fail to see what’s American in denying due process to someone like Abrego Garcia, or in repeatedly threatening our neighbors and allies with treaty cancellations and possible conquest, or in cavalierly mulling an unconstitutional third term, or in profiting from political office, or in arbitrarily sacking senior military officers and national security officials because a conspiracy theorist deems them to be disloyal. I don’t grasp the connection between Making America Great Again while tanking that symbol of American greatness known as Wall Street — all in the name of an economically illiterate and diplomatically ruinous obsession with tariffs and trade deficits.

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Angels for Sale

America needs to nail 95 theses to the megachurch door.

Last month, Paula White, one of President Trump’s most faithful and powerful evangelical supporters and a senior adviser to his new White House Faith Office, began offering “seven supernatural blessings” for the Easter season.

If you “honor God” during the period of Passover and Easter, “God will assign an angel to you, he’ll be an enemy to your enemies, he’ll give you prosperity, he’ll take sickness away from you, he will give you long life, he’ll bring increase in inheritance, and he’ll bring a special year of blessing.”

The suggested price for these extraordinary gifts is an offering to Paula White Ministries of $1,000 or more, and if health, wealth and an angel weren’t enough, White’s ministry will also give you a gorgeous Waterford crystal cross.

If you think White is alone in her cynical, heretical grift, then let me introduce you to Lorenzo Sewell, another of Trump’s Christian favorites. He’s a Detroit-area pastor who delivered a benediction at Trump’s second inauguration in January.

On the afternoon of Jan. 20, hours after he prayed in the Capitol Rotunda, Sewell posted on X, “The crypto community was kind enough to send me $Lorenzo, so I have permanently locked my tokens into a Liquidity Pool, so that I will never sell on the community but rather just earn fees as our token continues to flourish!”

“Amazing day, all the glory to God,” he added.

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Reality Check: RFK Jr is a nut, promoting fringe conspiracy theories and medical quackery

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine crusader, is not qualified to have any power at the agency that’s supposed to protect the health of Americans, said research analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald, which was formerly headed by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Cantor’s note came as Peter Marks, the head of the Food and Drug Administration’s biologics division, resigned in protest of Kennedy’s skepticism of vaccines. Kennedy has already taken steps that public health experts say could deter routine immunizations in the U.S.

“We call on the administration to re-evaluate RFK Jr’s role at HHS. Pushing out one of the most trusted leaders of the FDA to promote an anti-science agenda is a step too far for us,” analysts Josh Schimmer and Eric Schmidt wrote in an unusual note to clients Tuesday. “HHS cannot be led by an anti-vax, conspiracy theorist with inadequate training.”

Kennedy has downplayed the importance of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and promoted unproven treatments to counter a measles outbreak. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also carrying out a study into long-debunked links between vaccines and autism, led by a researcher with a history of spreading misinformation about shots.

Read the rest here.

EU Prepares Retaliation for Trump Tariffs

...“We will approach these negotiations from a position of strength,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech to the European Parliament on Tuesday, the eve of Trump’s big tariff announcement.

“Europe holds a lot of cards. From trade to technology, to the size of our market. But this strength is also built on our readiness to take firm countermeasures. All instruments are on the table.”

In targeting U.S. services, Brussels could be thinking of bulge-bracket banks like J.P. Morgan or Bank of America, or tech players like Elon Musk’s social network X, search giant Google, or Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer.

“We are certainly not excluding a bigger response, a better response and an even more creative response through services, through [intellectual property rights],” a senior European Union official told reporters in mid-March.

The EU is a net exporter of automobiles, pharmaceuticals and food to the U.S. But it’s a net importer of services — and that gives it more leverage in a trade dispute. (Taking goods and services together, transatlantic trade is actually broadly in balance. The EU enjoys an overall surplus of just $50 billion, or about 3 percent of the $1.7 trillion in annual transatlantic commerce.)

“America’s tech giants, financial industry, and pharma companies have deep roots in Europe. Push too far, and Brussels could tighten the screws: digital levies on Silicon Valley, regulatory clamps on Wall Street, or taxes on U.S. pharma exports,” said Tobias Gehrke, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. 

“America may wield the bigger stick, but Europe has plenty of sharp stones to throw.”

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