The MARA Book Club Meets This Evening

We will be discussing "The Missionary Kids" and "The Poisonwood Bible"

Good Morning:

Important Reminder: The MARA Book Club meets today at 6:00 pm Eastern time. We will be live from Politics & Prose in Washington DC with the estimable

Holly Berkley Fletcher

and the no-less-estimable

Alicia Wanless

. We will be discussing Holly’s book, “The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism” and its fiction wine-pairing: “The Poisonwood Bible,” by Barbara Kingsolver. Meetings of the MARA Book Club are for paid subscribers only.

Hint, hint, hint:

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Thursday on #DogShirtTV, the inexplicable horror film festival continued with a discussion of the film “Possession”:

And Friday on #DogShirtTV, we talked about various horror media, from H.R. Lovecraft to avant-garde theatre, and I finally revealed how I accidentally terrorized neighborhood children with a gorilla costume:

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#YourMusicOfTheDay: Operation Brahms

Okay, folks, this is an important one. Brahms’s first piano concerto, Op. 15, is his first true masterwork for orchestra.

I know that 53 minutes of your time is a lot to ask. But treat yourself. Really. And don’t just listen to it. Watch it.

This may not be the greatest recording of it ever; though it’s certainly up there, the famed Emil Gilels recording with the Berlin Philharmonic with Eugen Jochum conducting probably still takes that prize. But Hélène Grimaud’s performance with Michael Gielen conducting the Symphony of Baden-Baden and Freiburg is the most completely electrifying performance of this piece you can watch with a click of a YouTube button.

Grimaud is a goddess of a Brahms interpreter, who also—apropos of nothing—is the founder of the Wolf Conservation Center if you’re into wolf conservation. (And I am, and I love the Wolf Conservation Center’s social media.) High-quality video of her hands playing this piece is completely mesmerizing:

So let’s talk about Brahms’s first piano concerto for a minute. Up until the publication of this piece, Brahms is a young composer of extraordinary promise. He has written some beautiful piano music. He has written a luscious trio. But this is the piece with which he explodes into greatness. He was 25 when he wrote it.

Note a few things about it. The first is that though Brahms is a virtuosic pianist and the technical ability to even dream of playing this piece is completely beyond all but the world’s finest pianists, the purpose of the piece is emphatically not to show off the pianist’s skill. Brahms is not Franz Liszt. This piece is not about pyrotechnics.

Indeed, the piano does not dominate the performance. The orchestra is an equal partner, not merely there as a backup band for the soloist. To pull this piece off, you need a really good orchestra and a first-rate conductor, and they have to be working hand-in-glove with the soloist. This is a dialog between a piano and an orchestra, and between a piano and many different parts of the orchestra; this video actually does a lovely job of spotlighting the specific parts of the orchestra playing key moments in discussion with Grimaud.

Second, note the length of the melodies. Heart-meltingly long melodies are a defining feature of Brahms, and you really see that coming into clear focus here, particularly in the second and third movements.

Third, note the compositional discipline throughout the piece. Brahms is a Romantic period composer. But he revered form in a way other Romantics did not. There is no meandering slush here. There are no gushes of emotional release unguided by form and structure that, say, Mozart or Bach would recognize. The more complicated and ambitious Brahms’s pieces become, the more his commitment to form comes out. This is what people mean when they call Brahms a neoclassicist. And it sets him starkly apart from contemporaries like Wagner and Bruckner.

Finally, there’s the power and the elegance. From the first notes of this piece, there is something brashly confident about it. It’s the piece with which he said: I am here. I am not just a virtuosic pianist, though I can do that virtuosic shit with the best of them. I’m also a great composer. Deal with it.

So deal with it. And enjoy. By the way, Brahms’s second piano concerto is even better—but you’re going to have to wait for Op. 82 for that.

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The Situation

In Friday’s “The Situation” column, I distill the many pretrial motions former FBI Director James Comey’s legal team has submitted so far, which range from requesting a bill of particulars that clarifies the specific charges against him to arguing that Lindsey Halligan was never lawfully appointed as U.S. attorney at all:

No, the Comey defense so far is not complete. It is not his trial defense. Comey doesn’t get to argue in pretrial motions that the indictment should be dismissed because, for example, it’s false in its central allegations that he lied to Congress and obstructed a congressional committee’s investigation. Such matters of fact are jury questions, and they don’t get litigated until the trier of fact—the jury—is seated and the evidence presented. Rather, the defense as presented so far consists of arguments antecedent to factual questions about Comey’s guilt; they are about why the judge shouldn’t even let this matter go to trial at all but should throw it out without even seating a jury.

For the benefit of the reader who does not want to slog through multiple legal briefs—as well as for the reader who wants a 360 degree understanding of the arguments Comey is putting before the court—I have distilled the following composite of Comey’s various motions, drawn from all of the briefs in question and paraphrased in my own words. The goal is not a comprehensive account of the arguments he is making but a high-level summary of aggregate argumentation.

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Recently On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Isabel Arroyo

The Unitary Artificial Executive

Alan Rozenshtein warns that artificial intelligence will expand and consolidate presidential power in a way that fundamentally reshapes the executive branch.

And here’s why this matters: Once the president achieves AI-enabled control over the executive branch, all the other mechanisms become far more powerful. When emergency powers are invoked, the president can now deploy that authority systematically across every agency simultaneously through AI systems. Perfect enforcement becomes truly universal when presidential priorities are embedded algorithmically throughout government. Information dominance operates at massive scale when all executive branch communications are coordinated through shared AI frameworks. And inscrutable national security decisions multiply when every agency can act at machine speed under algorithmic control. Each mechanism reinforces the others.

The Case Against Unbounded Delegation in Trump v. V.O.S. Selections

Samuel Estreicher and Andrew Babbitt argue that the Supreme Court should not interpret the 1936 Curtiss-Wright decision as evidence for Congress’s unbounded ability to delegate foreign affairs authority to the executive branch. The authors review the statutes upon which Curtiss-Wright relies and contrast their limited scope with the broad invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act at issue in Trump v. V.O.S. Selections.

We write here to unpack this “historical gloss” argument in Curtiss-Wright. Justice Sutherland’s opinion catalogued a number of statutes that “either leave the exercise of the power to his unrestricted judgment or provide a standard far more general than that which has always been considered requisite with regard to domestic affairs.” Despite this assertion, these laws involved fairly narrow delegations, particularly when compared to IEEPA. The laws identified by Sutherland indeed exemplify defined limits on foreign affairs delegation—namely, limits on the duration of the delegations or the goods or locations that could be targeted. Consequently, the Supreme Court should not take the Curtiss-Wright case as upholding the kind of unbounded delegation authority claimed by Trump’s invocation of IEEPA.

The Appellate Void: Trump Could Defy Judges Without Confronting the Supreme Court

Andrew Coan explains how a president could exploit lower courts’ weak enforcement power against the federal government by simply declining to appeal injunctions to a higher court. Coan argues that—aided by the recent prohibition on universal injunctions—such a strategy could permit the executive to enforce contested policies against everyone but plaintiffs in particular lower court cases while avoiding a politically damaging showdown with higher courts.

If and when that moment arrives, it could play out in several ways. The most obvious scenario—and the one that has dominated the popular imagination—is a dramatic showdown between the president and the Supreme Court. But another plausible scenario has been largely overlooked: After an adverse ruling, government defendants might simply ignore the district court’s order and decline to appeal. As the prevailing party, the plaintiffs could not appeal either. The result is what I call an “appellate void”—a jurisdictional gap in which lower federal courts lack effective tools for enforcing their decisions against a recalcitrant executive, and higher courts lack any obvious path to intervene.

Peter Williams, Ex-ASD, Pleads Guilty to Selling Eight Exploits to Russia

In the latest edition of the Seriously Risky Business cybersecurity newsletter, Tom Uren discusses why a U.S. defense contractor manager’s sale of exploits to Russia should not make governments sour on private-sector exploit development, how strengthening the Office of the National Cyber Director could mitigate the impact of federal workforce and funding cuts on American cyber capacity, a data breach at the U.K. Defense Ministry that allowed the Taliban to target former British partners in Afghanistan, and more.

This whole episode is sordid and almost as serious as a leak directly from a Five Eyes agency. It’s even led some activists to question the role of commercial outfits in developing these types of exploits.

Leaks from commercial vendors are, evidently, a risk. But we wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.

Governments need exploits to protect and advance their interests, and it’s just not realistic for them to bring all vulnerability research and exploit development in-house and share those capabilities across agencies.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, Tyler McBrien sits down with Quico Toro to discuss Toro and Moisés Naím’s new book, “Charlatans: How Grifters, Swindlers, and Hucksters Bamboozle the Media, the Markets, and the Masses.” They touch on what defines a charlatan, the cognitive biases charlatans exploit, and how technological and societal changes have made charlatanism an urgent crisis.

On Rational Security, Scott R. Anderson sits down with McBrien and Ari Tabatabai to discuss the upcoming one-on-one meeting between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, tensions within the executive branch over the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean, and the devastation of Hurricane Melissa and predicted American foreign assistance response.

Videos

On Lawfare Live, I sit down with Scott R. Anderson, Loren Voss, Eric Columbus, and Marty Lederman to discuss a district judge’s recent ruling that the acting U.S. attorney in Southern California was serving unlawfully, litigation over the federalization and deployment of the National Guard, and legal challenges to the Trump administration’s plan to conduct mass firings during the government shutdown. Oh, and we wore costumes.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the Southern Right Whale, seen here saying hello to some visiting humans:

Video Source

In honor of today’s Beast, take a moment to rejoice in the fact that the ocean is full of big, friendly mammals. It’s kind of bizarre that that statement is true, but it is true, and well worth celebrating.