The Slumlord and the Colossal Squid

Plus critical polling results

Good Morning:

Let’s start today with interim results from our poll from yesterday about whether people want one email per day or two. There is still time to vote, but the winner so far is apathy. Among those with a preference, posting the show separately has a small lead over consolidating everything in one post. Unless that changes over the next day, we will plan on leaving things as they are. If you haven’t voted and wish to express a preference, you can do so here.

Meanwhile, a truly remarkable thing has happened in Lawfare’s ongoing fundraising drive, which is that 700 people have given a total of $80,000 over all of 48 hours. This is, let’s just say, wildly beyond any of our expectations. If you are one of those 700 people—and I know that many of you are—thank you so much. If you are not and you want to become one of them, you can do so here:

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Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the estimable Eve Gaumond came on to tell us about her new career as a slumlord. The estimable John Hawkinson and I interviewed her about the legal aspects of her exploitation of the working class, her plans for a homegrown rat population, and her luridly pink carpets:

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The Situation

Yesterday, I devoted my “The Situation” column to describing Judge James Boasberg’s contempt ruling in run-on sentences that end in “semblance of due process.” Here’s the longest of the run-on sentences:

And Judge Boasberg, I think, knows that the government has a third option, which is to appeal again and go up to the Supreme Court to complain that a single district judge is holding hostage the entire foreign policy of the United States and to complain in public that a single liberal district judge is trying to take over the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security and the foreign policy prerogatives of the president of the United States and wants to hold executive branch officials in contempt for failing to follow a lawless order that the Supreme Court already overturned and to have members of Congress introduce impeachment resolutions against this judge and to have other members of Congress talking about stripping the courts of jurisdiction over things and to do all of this knowing that while throwing up a lot of smoke won’t change the fact that the administration knowingly and intentionally and flagrantly violated a court order and Judge Boasberg’s opinion shows that conclusively, it will cause all kinds of people who should know better—not to mention even more people who probably can’t be expected to know better—to believe that the problem is the district judges who object to presidential lawlessness rather than to the lawlessness itself and the fact that his lawlessness has caused a couple of hundred people to rot in a Salvadoran prison with no semblance of due process.

The government has, in fact, now appealed.

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Today On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Caroline Cornett

A Trump Administration Plan to Crowdsource Deregulation?

Nick Bednar break down the Trump administration’s apparent attempt to pursue deregulation on a massive scale by asserting unilateral authority to rescind regulations and inviting the public to submit suggestions to cut existing regulations:

Two recent events suggest that the Trump administration intends to expeditiously rescind existing regulations: (a) a constitutional argument that the president has authority to unilaterally rescind regulations without following the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act and (b) a new online form that seeks to crowdsource the process of drafting these rescissions. When stitched together, the Trump administration has created a toolkit to rescind regulations without the required procedures of the Administrative Procedure Act or the involvement of the experts who understand the purpose of these regulations.

At the Mercy of Presidential Self-Restraint

Jack B. Greenberg and John A. Dearborn highlight the difficulty Congress now faces in ensuring independence for officials they intended to be insulated from political pressure, citing President Donald Trump’s firings of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the special counsel:

The Dellinger case thus brings a long-growing dilemma for Congress into sharp relief. As the courts increasingly adopt a formalistic conception of the separation of powers, Congress’s ability to address concerns about presidential power in legislation about appointments is curtailed, and correspondingly, its reliance on presidential self-restraint is increased. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States made this plain, holding that Congress is unable, “as a structural matter,” to regulate the actions of the president that fall within their “exclusive sphere of authority,” including executive branch removals. Given rulings like this one, it is unclear that Congress would succeed even if it sought stronger protections of the independence of key officials. For example, granting for-cause removal protections to IGs, a provision included in the Protecting Our Democracy Act legislation that had passed the House in 2021, would have likely been viewed with skepticism by the current Court.

Data Brokerage and the Third-Country National Security Problem

Justin Sherman explains how adversarial foreign actors exploit gaps in United States law to purchase sensitive information from data brokers or other intermediaries. Sherman critiques the U.S.’s current approach of restricting direct sales of data and calls upon the government to develop more robust privacy legislation and data restrictions that close the gap:

But this latest story underscores all the possible directions in which brokered data can flow—a U.S. broker buying data on U.S. persons from a European advertising technology vendor; hypothetically, a Singaporean firm sourcing location data that it sells from apps in Latin America, encompassing travelers from many countries; or any other myriad possibilities involving different buyers and sellers in different countries, in variable numbers of transactions, with different types of data related to different people. Therefore, the government’s focus on direct sales to a few countries creates the opportunity for ill-intentioned foreign actors to buy Americans’ data indirectly through a series of transactions, which circumvents programs designed to look (again, importantly) just at direct sales and transfers involving a few previously identified adversaries. It’s a significant gap. To address this issue, Congress should implement restrictions on the sale of many kinds of data, on all Americans, to any buyer, to clamp down on the unwieldy data supply chain enabling this significant risk to national security.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, Natalie Orpett sits down with Jonathan Lowy and Chantal Flores to discuss the recent oral arguments in Mexico v. Smith & Wesson, in which Mexico seeks to hold U.S. gun manufacturers accountable for cartels' use of American weapons. They talk about the flow of U.S.-made guns into Mexico, how it relates to cartel violence, and the complicated legal and policy context around Mexico’s case:

Videos

On April 18 at 4 p.m. ET, I will speak to Anna Bower, Roger Parloff, Quinta Jurecic, and James Pearce about the status of the civil litigation against President Donald Trump’s executive actions, including Judge James Boasberg's finding of probable cause for contempt in the Alien Enemies Act case:

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is hide-and-seek reigning world champion, the colossal squid:

The BBC reports:

A colossal squid has been filmed in its natural environment for the first time since the species was discovered 100 years ago.

The 30cm-long (11.8in) juvenile was caught on camera at a depth of 600m (1,968 ft), near the South Sandwich Islands in the south Atlantic Ocean.

A team of scientists, led by a University of Essex academic, recorded the footage in March during a 35-day quest to find new marine life.

Experts believe colossal squid can grow up to 7m (23 ft) in length and weigh up to 500 kg (1,100 lb)—making them the heaviest invertebrate on the planet.

The mollusc was discovered on the 100-year anniversary of it first being identified and named.

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Dying adults have previously been filmed by people fishing, but have never been seen alive at depth.

The Natural History Museum has suggested it is hard to estimate the global population of colossal squids.

In 2022, the institution said the lack of observations meant that "even to this day, the enormous invertebrates still straddle the line between legend and reality".

Here it is:

In honor of today’s Bea—oh shit, the colossal squid just got found, which means the colossal squid gets to be “it” now. This is very, very bad.

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Reasons I’m Scared About The Colossal Squid Being “It”