Celebrating Democracy Even When It's Hard
It's worth fighting for
Good Evening:
Today I took the train up to New York for two events, the first of which took place this evening. It was the gala dinner for the Renew Democracy Initiative, which was founded by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and is run by my friend Uriel Epstein (pictured above with me). It is a mark of my deep respect for RDI’s work and for Uriel that I did not wear a dog shirt. (Uriel informs me that this evening was the first time he has ever seen me not in a dog shirt.)
Not by coincidence,
launched a Substack today:
I’m excited about it.
Today on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Alicia Wanless requested my help, the estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher’s help, and the help of the Greek Chorus in practicing her book-talk. So she practiced on us, and told us about her new book, The Information Animal, a study of human information consumption, historical and modern. Pre-order the book here!
Today On Lawfare
Compiled by the estimable Caroline Cornett
Are Tariffs an Emergency Power?
Samuel Estreicher and Andrew Babbitt explain how President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) bypasses typical tariff authorities and why Congress is limited in its ability to control the president’s power:
This congressional inability to meaningfully control the president’s powers under IEEPA is precisely the problem Congress attempted to solve back in the 1970s. The TWEA had “become essentially an unlimited grant of authority for the President to exercise, at his discretion, broad powers in both the domestic and international economic arena, without congressional review.” Without the legislative veto in the NEA, the president’s powers under IEEPA warrant an identical concern. President Trump’s use of IEEPA to implement broad tariffs against other nations with minimal process or oversight is inconsistent with the typical process for executive tariffs. Instead, Trump is using IEEPA as a source of (as Rep. Bingham worried in 1977) “unlimited power … to act virtually at will”—the very thing IEEPA was meant to prevent.
Learning From the Legacy of 18F
David Eaves and Hillary Hartley reflect on the legacy of recently dismantled 18F, a team of technologists housed within the Government Services Administration who worked with agencies to make government services accessible and available online. Eaves and Hartley offer lessons informed by 18F’s success in building sustainable, reusable tools and products, and reflect on where the program fell short:
GSA had created something special: the ability to create a pipeline for innovation in government. 18F’s sensory capacity to spot trends, its entrepreneurial potential to rethink first principles in how to address identified needs, and its ability to transform ideas into scaled, efficient, and reliable systems operated by TTS in a more bureaucratic tradition were all made possible by an unusual funding model. This is a state capacity worth understanding. It also makes it all the more perplexing why a government would choose to dismantle rather than reform 18F.
Podcasts
In the first episode of Escalation—Lawfare and Goat Rodeo’s new limited series narrative podcast chronicling the surreal twists and turns in the U.S. and Ukraine’s relationship over the years—co-hosts Tyler McBrien and Anastasiia Lapatina discuss the end of the Cold War and the U.S. fears about the dangers Ukrainian independence could bring.
Documents
Caroline Cornett shares an executive order imposing a 10 percent tariff on all U.S. imports and additional reciprocal tariffs on approximately 57 nations.
Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is a baby spoonbill, which earns its title today for being the very definition of the word “ungainly.”
In honor of today’s Beast, remember that you too were once pink, fuzzy, and pathetic.
Tell Me Something Interesting
In light of Cory Booker’s recent antics in the Senate, let us (me, EJ Wittes, the one who does this kind of thing) consider the filibuster.
As a tactic in Senatorial deliberation, the filibuster goes back to the oldest Senate of them all. Cato the Younger, for instance, was somewhat infamous for the tactic, as Plutarch tells us:
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