A New Scheduling Format For Dog Shirts
I seem to have eased into it.
Good Morning:
This baby also spent the night in her rather swanker bomb shelter:
She’s fine, by the way.
The Situation
In my “The Situation” column yesterday, I took a close look at the legal authority behind the president’s most recent attack on Harvard University:
To allow 1812(f) to be invoked in this fashion, for all the breadth of its language—which is real and which we shouldn’t underestimate—thus allows it to be turned into an instrument of domestic coercion and retribution.
Consider a few hypothetical examples if this invocation passes muster:
Elon Musk and President Trump don’t seem to be getting along very well right now. Could the president use 1812(f) to suspend entry of any H-1B visa holders intending to work for Tesla or SpaceX?
Could President Trump use 1812(f) to suspend entry to any visa holders of any kind who don’t promise at a port of entry to attend MAGA rallies or whom any CBP officer finds, for whatever reason, are likely to attend political protests directed against the administration?
What about press organizations? Or the law firms Trump has already sanctioned? Could President Trump suspend the entry of people intending to work for such disfavored groups? What about people who merely read what he terms the “fake news”?
The point here is that once the courts accept that 1812(f) allows the president to define a class of aliens by the lawful activity they intend to engage in within the United States—rather than by some organic feature of their alienage itself—the capacity to end-run the First Amendment is extraordinary.
Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable
gave us news from various African countries, the estimable Carol from the Collegium solicited help with choosing a slogan for a Pride poster, and I talked about lobbying strategy in the current congressional environment:New Scheduling Format
Over the last few weeks, I seem to have eased into a new scheduling format for #DogShirtDaily.
and I discussed it yesterday and we’ve decided to make it official. Four days a week, which is to say Tuesday through Friday, the dog shirt will land in your email in the morning, before #DogShirtTV at 8:00 am eastern time. Sunday, however, the dog shirt will be an evening affair, showing up sometime before I go to bed at night. There will be no Monday or Saturday dog shirt, save when I adjust the schedule for reasons of my own convenience. I want to emphasize that these are norms, not rules, and I reserve the right to adjust them at any time.Also, we have decided to regularize the timing of publication of the show, on both YouTube and Substack and the podcast feed. All shows will publish at 5:00 pm eastern on the day they are recorded. In other words, you should get a dog shirt in the morning and a show in the late afternoon.
Substack Lives will happen as they happen. There is no schedule.
Finally, I am still thinking about what to do for our poor beleaguered West Coast subscribers who want to join the show live and mysteriously don’t find the 5:00 am slot attractive. It’s a real problem because of this whole running Lawfare thing. But I hope to have an announcement on the subject in the next couple of weeks.
Yesterday On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Katherine Pompilio
Bureaucracy’s Boundaries
Anne Joseph O’Connell considers the constitutional issue of whether the president has the legal authority to fire the librarian of Congress and the statutory issue of whether the president can use the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 to name an acting librarian of Congress.
Republicans in Congress have almost entirely acquiesced to the new Trump administration. But we are seeing Republican congressional leaders’ resistance to the White House taking over the Library of Congress in this fashion. For instance, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters that they “made it clear that there needs to be a consultation around this—that there are equities that both Article I and Article II branches have [with] the Library of Congress.” I expect one possible outcome is for the White House to nominate (and the Senate to confirm) a new librarian, who could either reinstate Perlmutter or more likely replace her with a new head of the Copyright Office. The government would provide Perlmutter with back pay. And the Library would largely continue to function as it has in the past.
Sanctions Relief for Myanmar: A Case Study
Ivonne Duarte-Peña examines the United States’ and the European Union’s rollback of sanctions against Myanmar in the 2010s. Duarte-Peña asserts that sanctions relief can be used as leverage to enact political and economic reforms in a country of interest.
As sanctions and export controls increasingly become a go-to tool in Western foreign policy, it is important to remember that the diplomatic utility for the states that use them as leverage tools hinges on how easily they can be relaxed or removed. The United States’s rollback of sanctions against Myanmar in the 2010s presents—despite their reimposition the following decade—a rare case study with notable lessons about the importance of ensuring that any reversal of economic coercion is part of a holistic and timely approach to international support: one that emphasizes robust diplomacy attuned to civil society assessments, sustained economic aid, technical assistance for domestic reforms, and engagement with the private sector to make use of licenses and suspensions.
Podcasts
On Lawfare Daily, I sit down with Anastasiia Lapatina and Mykhailo Soldatenko to discuss the latest in Ukrainian-Russians. We unpack this week’s surprise attacks, an amassing of troops, bridge explosions, and peace talks in Istanbul.
Documents
Katherine Pompilio shares President Trump’s executive order purporting to restrict the entry of foreign nationals to the U.S. who plan to attend Harvard University.
Pompilio shares a White House memorandum directing the counsel to the president and the attorney general to conduct an investigation into alleged efforts of former White House aides to conceal former President Biden’s “cognitive decline.”
Pompilio also shares Trump’s proclamation purporting to restrict the entry of foreign nationals from 19 countries.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is a recently shorn alpaca:
In honor of today’s Beast, be grateful to the alpaca for all the sweaters it has given you.
A Philosophical Query
I—EJ Wittes—recently found myself reading about genetic testing for Huntington’s Disease (for reasons related to my own random yet insatiable curiosity). Huntington’s Disease, for those unfamiliar, is an incurable degenerative neurological disorder, wherein people lose control over their minds and bodies over the course of about a decade and eventually die. It sucks.
It’s also genetic. If one of your parents had it, you have a 50 percent chance of getting it. Since the condition usually doesn’t develop until well into adulthood, there exists a population of people with a parent who had Huntington’s, who thus know that they have even odds of getting Huntington’s themselves, and who could get a simple genetic test to find out whether or not they’re going to die slowly and horribly in middle age.
So do these people get tested? Mostly not. The exact rate varies from country to country, but generally between 80 and 90 percent of people at risk of Huntington’s choose not to be tested. This seems insane to me. Obviously, if you might die horribly from a genetic disease, you should want to have that information, right?
I posed this question to my father, who thinks that my attitude is decidedly atypical and proposes the following question by way of demonstration:
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