The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

An important anniversary

Good Morning:

I make a practice of not posting pictures of myself on social media. But I have to say that this one made me happy. If I leave this earth as the guy who enabled

Anna Bower

to found the #WITAOD cult and who never took himself too seriously to wear an absurd dog shirt, I will be content with my contribution to humanity.

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Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable

Holly Berkley Fletcher

gave us an update on her safari adventures and explained what “Kiswahili,” as opposed to “Swahili,” means. The estimable

Alicia Wanless

checked in after her European book tour and vacation for a discussion of Swedish and Canadian politics. The estimable

Jonathan Rauch

came by with a question about the posture of the Supreme Court:

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Yesterday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Mary Ford

The Government’s Astonishing Constitutional Claims on TikTok

Alan Rozenshtein responds to the release of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s letters to major American tech companies about continued business with TikTok. Rozenshtein argues that the battle over TikTok presents a rule-of-law crisis, as the Department of Justice has advanced an expansive interpretation of presidential authority to rationalize the extension of the TikTok ban deadline in the United States.

But the primary, and more constitutionally audacious, argument advanced in the letters is a claim of sweeping Article II power. According to Bondi, the president determined that an “abrupt shutdown” of TikTok would “interfere with the execution of the President’s constitutional duties to take care of the national security and foreign affairs of the United States.” On this basis, the attorney general “concluded that [PAFACAA] is properly read not to infringe upon such core Presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.”

A Better Way to Talk About Risk

In the latest installment of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Kim Cragin acknowledges that the United States is willing to accept certain risks from Russia, Iran, North Korea, and terrorist groups in order to focus energy on deterring Chinese aggression, and considers the U.S.’s current approach to assessing threats such as extremism.

It may seem like a throwaway phrase, “accept risk.” It’s not. If risk is the potential for something bad to happen, then the United States is accepting that something bad might happen elsewhere to prevent something bad from happening in Asia. One of those “elsewheres” could be the homeland. The U.S. military has played an instrumental role in disrupting terrorist attacks against the West since 9/11. A shift away from countering terrorism logically increases the risk of such an attack. It might be possible to alleviate some risk through heightened border security. However, these trade-offs have yet to be fully explored.

The FBI’s Dangerous Failure to Adapt to the Digital Age

Susan Landau explains that—as demonstrated by a recent Office of the Inspector General report—the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) isn’t sufficiently prepared to respond to ubiquitous technical surveillance concerns, a vulnerability that has enabled foreign adversaries to exploit advancing technology and expose operations.

U.S. adversaries have turned the highly networked world the U.S. has built against it. Iranian hackers exploited data from Israeli home security cameras to improve missile targeting. The Russians used a similar technique in targeting sites in Kyiv. These foes may lack the ability to create new technologies, but they’re every bit as capable of exploiting the technology the U.S. developed. And now they’re playing David to the U.S.’s Goliath. Yet despite the 2011 loss of informants in Beirut, the current Iranian use of Israeli home security cameras, and all the examples in between, the FBI does not seem to have learned its lesson.

War and Responsibility: Why the U.S. Doesn’t Have an Imperial Presidency

Patrick Hulme maintains that the “imperial presidency” thesis—the notion that the executive has amassed ever-increasing power such that the will of Congress is bypassed—falls short in explaining the “war-making” power. Hulme emphasizes that war-making is a place where executive authority reaches its limits, using data from previous administrations to support his analysis.

In a newly published piece (“War and Responsibility”) for the American Political Science Review, however, I argue that when it comes to this most core power of the thesis—the war-making power—the imperial presidency falls short. I submit, instead, that the current understanding of the war powers status quo has long been, at best, incomplete, and filled with substantial misunderstanding. In contrast to widespread pessimism toward congressional influence over use of force decisions, I argue that Congress has been exerting considerable constraint on the executive all along; political scientists and legal scholars have just been looking for its influence in the wrong places.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, Winnona Bernsen, nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Cyber Statecraft Initiative and founder of DistrictCon, joins Lawfare Contributing Editor Justin Sherman to discuss Bernsen’s most recent report, “Crash (Exploit) and Burn: Securing the Offensive Cyber Supply Chain to Counter China in Cyberspace,” and the U.S. offensive in the cyber industry.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is Fiona the pregnant ichthyosaur fossil:

The New York Times reports:

About 131 million years ago, a pregnant ichthyosaur — a dolphin-like reptile of the dinosaur era — swam in seas that are now part of southern Chile. And then she died.

An accomplice in the killing: the breakup of the southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland.

…

The geological forces that pulled apart the continents also ruptured the Earth’s crust, causing volcanoes and earthquakes, and those earthquakes sometimes set off massive underwater landslides.

One day in the early Cretaceous period, one of those landslides collapsed down a submarine canyon in Roca Verdes, generating turbulent flows of sediment.

“Probably these landslides might have trapped the ichthyosaurs and threw them to the bottom of the canyon and covered them with sediment,” said Judith Pardo-Pérez, an associate professor at the University of Magallanes in Chile.

The burial in sediment of the 13-foot-long ichthyosaur preserved its corpse. Its bones transformed into fossils. The sediments hardened to rock. Over millions of years, tectonic forces closed up Roca Verdes and pushed it upward.

Until recently, a glacier covered the site, but in a warming world, the snow has melted, exposing the bones, which Dr. Pardo-Pérez discovered in 2009. The site is remote, cold and windy. Not until 2022 was a team of researchers able to excavate the largely intact skeleton, in five blocks, each weighing about 400 pounds, and then fly the blocks by helicopter to the Natural History Museum Río Seco in Punta Arenas, Chile.

They named their fossil skeleton discovery Fiona, after the princess-turned-ogre in the “Shrek” movies, because a glue used to protect it seeped into fissures in the rock, reacted with vegetation growing there and stained the skeleton.

“Extremely green, like fluorescent green,” Dr. Pardo-Pérez said. “After that, we washed it with liquids, and then she came back to the normal color.”

But the name stuck.

What was inside Fiona was also striking: an unborn baby, about 20 inches long, with its tail pointing toward the birth canal. Although they were reptiles, ichthyosaurs did not lay eggs, but gave birth to live young. Inside her rib cage was a jumble of small fish bones, possibly the leftovers of her last meal.

In honor of today’s Beast, eat a jumble of small fish, bones included.

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Tell Me Something Interesting

Not only was yesterday, July 7, World Kiswahili Language Day, it was also the anniversary of an important—nay, a critical—event. On July 7th, 1928, sliced bread was introduced to the world.

Yes, sliced bread. That sliced bread. The Sliced bread of “the greatest thing since sliced bread” fame. There was a time before sliced bread, and there is now the time since sliced bread, and in between, there was one glorious day in which sliced bread came to be, and this year, we celebrate the 97th anniversary of that triumph of human skill and ingenuity—which has remained the standard by which skill and ingenuity are measured since.