Assorted Stuff

And a #BeastOfTheDay of unusual excellence

Good Morning:

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Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, we had a live correction. In yesterday’s dog shirt, we awarded first prize in our caption contest to the estimable Patricia Jaeger. Now, as estimable as Ms. Jaeger may be—and she is, indeed, very estimable—she did not, in fact, write the winning entry. As a close inspection of the entries reflects, that distinction is owed to the estimable Linda Hoffman, who showed up at the top of yesterday’s show to point out this fact. We regret the error and have appended a correction to yesterday’s dog shirt.

Following our ritual humiliation at the top of the hour for being oh-so-wrong, the estimable

Holly Berkley Fletcher

took over the show and brought us news of South Sudan, her forthcoming book, refugees, and a hero named Carlos:

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Friends Move to Substack

Every day, friends keep moving to Substack. I think this is a good thing. Substack, unlike social media platforms, is designed to support writers and acts as an agent for them financially. It supports a lot of different forms of content creation, everything from video and podcasts to long-form writing and live conversation. And most importantly, from my point of view, it allows writers to develop their own audiences and to take with them their subscriber lists if and when they decide to go elsewhere. The clustering of writing around this platform is a genuinely good development in an otherwise bad media ecosystem, though, as my friend

Renee DiResta

points out, it also allows some really bad people to monetize really bad work.

Today I want to point out two friends who have recently migrated over here. One is

Preet Bharara

, who probably needs no introduction to this crowd. Preet has become a bit of a celebrity since his firing by President Trump at the beginning of Season I. He is also a very serious guy, one with a remarkably high signal-to-noise ratio. He surrounds himself with smart and interesting and knowledgeable people. And he’s funny:

My other recommendation is a friend whom you may not have heard of. I got to know

Emily Horne

back when she was the head of communications at Brookings. Emily went on to become the spokesperson for the National Security Council under President Biden and now has a Substack called “Spin Class” devoted to, as she writes:

comms and media as most of us actually experience them today: through a flood of channels but still in bubbles, curated by both powerful humans and algorithms (with their own agendas), and refusing to stay squarely in any one vertical or topic.

Spin Class asks why we’re seeing what we’re seeing, what’s the backstory, how are people in power are advancing an agenda or selling you something. We also interview people shaking things up in comms and news and go deeper on history, theory, and case studies.

In an attempt to build an interesting and useful media ecosystem, I will add Substacks like this to my Recommendations list.

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You Can Plant Sunflowers Too

I meant to highlight this yesterday, but I forgot so I am doing it today. A lot of people ask me how they can get into the planting sunflower action. These good folks in Vermont distribute free seeds all over the state and have been known to send them outside of Vermont to those who ask. Use the QR code in this photo to be in touch with them, get seeds, and make a donation:

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Yesterday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Caroline Cornett

The Trump Admin’s Attempt to Redefine a ‘Foreign Affairs Function’

Kathleen Claussen and Timothy Meyer explain why courts are likely to reject the Trump administration’s attempt to extend the executive branch’s “foreign affairs function” to any issues involving cross-border exchange, which would insulate governmental cross-border regulatory activity from the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and judicial review.

Apart from its inconsistency with judicial interpretations of the foreign affairs exception, as a practical matter, excepting all regulatory activity that governs the movement of goods and services across borders would give the administration a free hand in areas in which Congress clearly did not intend to eliminate the deliberative processes required by the APA. In many of the challenges to Trump administration actions to date, courts have been able to find that plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of APA claims. That finding of a likelihood of success on the merits is an essential component of granting a preliminary injunction, which courts have done against a wide range of Trump administration actions, ranging from spending cuts to birthright citizenship (to cite only two examples from the president’s current term). By introducing the possibility that the foreign affairs exceptions to APA rules apply, the Trump administration could seek to cast doubt on the likelihood of plaintiffs’ success on the merits of their claims.

How Trump Is Disappearing Migrants

Katherine Hawkins details how President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda has increasingly utilized incommunicado detention—which cuts detainees off from communication and prevents them from invoking their rights—to deport migrants. Hawkins emphasizes the need for judicial and congressional action to stop this trend and ensure the administration adheres to legal standards.

Incommunicado and unacknowledged detention make it difficult or impossible for people to invoke their constitutional rights and statutory protections under U.S. immigration law. If detainees cannot speak to their lawyers, their families, or anyone but their jailers, they cannot tell anyone if they are beaten, tortured, denied medical care or adequate food and water, or threatened with deportation to a country where they may face even worse abuses. They cannot file lawsuits or otherwise assert their rights in court. They cannot obtain evidence proving that they are not gang members, or that they have lawful immigration status. If family members and counsel can’t find or speak to their clients, they cannot do so either.

What’s Going on at the IRS?

Vanessa Williamson and Ellis Chen discuss how the Trump administration’s undermining of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) through workforce cuts, weaker prosecution of white collar crime, and elimination of data security and privacy protections will reduce the United States’s tax revenue and speed democratic erosion.

The trend is clear: the decline of independent civil service and the rise of partisan loyalism at the top of the tax agency. Increasing the political control of the IRS was an explicit goal of the Heritage Foundation’s presidential transition playbook known as “Project 2025,” which called for a drastic increase in presidential appointees at the IRS, including appointees “not subject to Senate confirmation.” The politicization of the tax agency will likely accelerate with the recent revival of “Schedule F,” a regulatory change first proposed at the end of the first Trump administration that would remove civil service protections from about 50,000 federal employees. As political scientist Don Moynihan has noted, politicization of the civil service encourages corruption and extremism in government.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, Anastasiia Lapatina speaks to Mykola Bielieskov about Trump’s failure to end Russia’s war in Ukraine and what it will take for Russia to stop the war.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is Frodrick:

Video Source

In honor of today’s Beast, house your local Frod.