"This Depraved Idiot Is Out of Control": With Middle East in Flames, Trump Eyes "Next Conquest"

 

 Donald Trump said late Wednesday that the American military is already looking ahead to its “next conquest” as the Middle East remains embroiled in a deadly military conflict that Trump and his ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unleashed six weeks ago.

In a late-night post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said US forces will remain “in place” and “around” Iran until a “real agreement” is reached to end the war, as the two-week ceasefire the president and Iranian leaders announced late Tuesday hangs by a thread due to Israel’s massive bombardment of Lebanon.

After threatening a “bigger, and better, and stronger” assault on Iran if peace talks collapse, Trump said the US military is “Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest”—even as senior administration officials expressed concerns that the president’s declarations of victory in Iran were premature.

Branislav Slantchev, an international relations expert who teaches political science at the University of California San Diego, wrote in response to Trump’s post that “this depraved idiot is out of control.” “We cannot live this way,” added journalist Marisa Kabas.

Trump, who has bombed more countries than any other president in modern US history despite campaigning on “no new wars,” did not name any potential targets of the American military’s “next conquest” in his Wednesday night post. But the president has lobbed threats against Cuba and Greenland repeatedly in recent months, threatening to seize both island nations by force. Last week, Trump asked Congress to approve a $1.5 trillion military budget for the coming fiscal year—a request that included tens of billions for new battleships and fighter jets.

During a speech at a Saudi-backed investment summit in Miami last month, Trump touted the US military’s illegal attacks on Venezuela and Iran before declaring, “Cuba is next.” “Pretend I didn’t say ⁠that,” the president added.

In a separate Truth Social post Wednesday night, Trump hit out at NATO and characterized Greenland, in all-caps, as a “BIG, POORLY RUN, PIECE OF ICE.”

Brian Finucane, senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, argued that Trump is “lashing out because his war on a whim did not result in the hoped-for ‘Venezuela’ in Iran but a historic debacle instead.”

The Intercept’s Nick Turse reported last month that amid the Iran war, a top Pentagon official “revealed that US wars in the Western Hemisphere are also expanding, unveiling an effort dubbed ‘Operation Total Extermination.’”

Joseph Humire, the Pentagon’s acting assistant secretary for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, told lawmakers that the US military “supported ‘bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border’” in early March, according to Turse.

“The US–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by ‘ricochet effect’ on March 3, leaving an unexploded 500-pound bomb lying in Colombia’s border region,” Turse reported. 

“In addition to his wars in the Western hemisphere, Trump has also launched attacks on Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen during his second term—most of them sites of US conflicts during the war on terror.”

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

“He’s becoming more unstable by the day"

Donald Trump cannot erase from Americans’ memories his recent displays of emotional and mental unfitness, which ended in strategic defeat. The issue is not whether he will be forced from office — his Republican toadies for now will make sure that never happens so long as they are in control — but whether he should be.

Democrats who make the case that Trump has irreversibly revealed his unfitness to lead do the country and our democracy a service. If nothing else, they highlight the utter irresponsibility of Trump’s lapdogs in Congress in leaving him in control of the armed forces, including nuclear weapons.

“Donald Trump has blown past every requirement to be removed from office. And it’s getting worse,” said Rep. John Larson (D-CT), who filed articles of impeachment this week. “He’s becoming more unstable by the day. His profane and sacrilegious Easter Sunday and subsequent threats, including ‘a whole civilization will die’ and ‘open the Strait…or you’ll be living in hell’ not only foreshadow war crimes, but put our security at risk.”

While Larson urged Vice President JD Vance and Trump’s Cabinet to act, he is not banking on that. He vowed “to help build a clear and undeniable record of Donald Trump’s corruption, high crimes, and violations of the Constitution, so that when the moment comes, whether in this Congress or the next, we are prepared to act decisively and uphold the rule of law.”

He is hardly alone. Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) also said she would file articles of impeachment. Beyond that, Axios counted at least 85 Democrats (mostly House members) who spoke out on Tuesday to urge he be removed via the 25^th Amendment or impeachment. The reason for impeachment did not vanish with the ceasefire (about which Trump is wildly lying), as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) explained: The President has threatened a genocide against the Iranian people, and is continuing to leverage that threat.

He has launched a massive war of enormous risk and of catastrophic consequence without reason, rationale, nor Congressional authorization — which is as clear a violation of the Constitution as any. Each day this goes on, the risk and criminality of these actions escalate for our nation and the world.

Moreover, this administration’s self-enrichment, insider trading, and pure corruption off this chaos — from cryptocurrencies to predictive trading markets to bribe “settlements” — has placed the Trump administration’s pursuit of personal wealth squarely against the wellbeing of our nation and its people.

All of these incidents, and plenty more, have clearly driven our country past the threshold for impeachment or invocation of the 25th amendment. We cannot risk the world nor the wellbeing of our nation any longer. None of these considerations should be partisan, but shared in good faith by Americans of all backgrounds who care for the safety and stability of the United States.

AOC makes a critical point: While Trump plainly violated the Constitution in launching and conducting the war, the risk is enormous that he will do even worse as time passes. (That’s an entirely reasonable conclusion, whether you believe he has dementia or simply conclude with age, he is less able to cope when the walls close in). This would be a prophylactic impeachment necessary to remove a ticking time bomb (excuse the metaphor) that could go off at any time.

After the ceasefire’s announcement, other House Democrats echoed AOC’s call for impeachment. “Temporary ceasefire or not, Trump already committed an impeachable offense,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) tweeted. “Congress needs to get back to work and remove him from office before he does more damage to our country and the world.” Likewise, Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) tweeted: “Just because a President announces he’s agreed to a two week ceasefire moments before he threatened to commit war crimes, does not mean he is suddenly fit to serve.”

Why raise impeachment if it is not attainable now? For one thing, Democrats need to be on record warning the country that Trump’s continued occupancy of the Oval Office endangers all Americans. In ignoring unmistakable signs of his mental, emotional, and moral infirmity, Republicans assume full responsibility for all debacles that one can reasonably anticipate for the remainder of his term (e.g., further wars and war crimes, increasingly extreme incitement against judges).

Without reference to previous corruption and wrongdoing, to impeach solely based on how he has handled Iran provides at least four separate and wholly sufficient grounds for impeachment:

1.) Violation of the Constitution in taking the country to war without congressional consent.

2.) Violation of international law (and thereby U.S. law via the Supremacy Clause) in threatening genocide.

3.) Unforgivable malfeasance in ignoring all warnings about the risk of Iran’s retaliation and capture of the Strait of Hormuz; and

4.) Stunning capitulation that endangers our national security and ignores his obligations as commander-in-chief.

Somehow, he actually celebrates handing Iran — a brutal regime, sworn enemy of the United States, and international scofflaw he has identified as “evil” — the Strait of Hormuz, without restrictions on Iran’s uranium enrichment or missile programs, and without support for regional proxies. In doing so, he either misrepresents or doesn’t understand what he gave away.

Major General (Ret.) Paul Eaton argues that unconstitutionally cutting out Congress was the genesis of the horrors that followed. “A congressional debate would have forced this administration to articulate a strategy, define objectives, and present metrics for success — the basic elements of any military campaign,” he argues.

Without that debate, we went to war with the ability to blow things up and no coherent idea of why we were blowing them up.... A war that cannot define its own purpose cannot be won.

Eaton, like numerous experts (“Iran has survived this war battered but sounding triumphant, and it has good reason to be”) well-versed in the Middle East and this “strategic fiasco”, concludes: “This was a net loss for the United States.” Indeed, this is an egregious, entirely predictable, and wholly avoidable loss that will put us at a significant economic and geopolitical disadvantage for years to come.

In sum, the undaunted, unwavering, and uncompromising patriots who warned in advance of the dangers of this unconstitutional folly and continue to advocate for Trump’s removal deserve our thanks and praise. This is a debacle of historic proportions; let Republicans defend keeping a madman in office for another 2 ½+ years. We salute them and encourage others to join the “Get him out of there!” chorus.

The Contrarian is reader-supported. To add your voice to this chorus and help keep the opposition movement alive and engaged, please join the fight by becoming a paid subscriber.

 

The automatic military draft registration takes effect in December

 

Young, eligible men will be automatically registered for the military draft pool starting in December as part of a measure tucked into the annual defense policy bill Congress signed into law late last year. Men ages 18 to 26 must already register for selective service in case a draft is required. The last time a draft was in effect was February 1973, during the Vietnam War.

Automatic registration is already in place in 46 states and territories, according to the Selective Service System’s 2024 report. The SSS proposed a rule to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs late last month to implement the practice nationwide.

The nationwide measure has no connection to the ongoing war with Iran and was passed with bipartisan support months before the current conflict with the country. But the Trump administration has declined to rule out the possibility of putting US troops on the ground, and the war has led to renewed attention on the draft policy. Here’s what you need to know about automatic Selective Service registration.

Who will be registered and how will it work?

According to the National Defense Authorization Act, which Trump signed into law in December, the automatic registration will apply to male US citizens and “every other male person” in the country between the ages of 18 and 26. The mandatory registration applies to green-card holders, refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented men. Those on non-immigrant visas are exempt.

Currently, in states that haven’t enacted automatic registration, men must register “within 30 days of (their) 18th birthday,” according to the SSS website. The agency “accepts late registrations up until” a man’s 26th birthday.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

It is a felony to not register for selective service and can result in the loss of certain benefits, like some student loans and federal jobs. It’s also a violation of the Military Selective Service Act, which could lead to imprisonment up to five years and a fine of up to $250,000.

Some places, like Arizona and Delaware, and Washington, DC, automatically register eligible men when they apply for driver’s license or another form of state identification. Meanwhile, in New York, the application for driver’s license includes a section that allows eligible men to register for selective service.

According to the SSS’ 2023 report, over 60% of registration came from state motor vehicle departments. Democratic Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, who sponsored the automatic selective service language, told CNN in a statement, “Making registration automatic, not only saves taxpayer dollars by eliminating the need to advertise but finally ensures that young men are not unknowingly penalized.” In the statement, Houlahan stressed that the measure has bipartisan support.

The NDAA passed with bipartisan votes in the House and Senate.

What happens in a draft?

Congress would have to approve of a draft before one ever took place. And not all registered men would be enlisted to serve. There would be a lottery, in which birthdays and numbers are randomly chosen. People whose 20th birthdays fall in the year of the draft would be the first to get induction orders, followed, in order, by the following age groups: 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 19 and those who are more than six months past their 18th birthday.

People who are selected would be allowed to make a request for exemption or deferment. All men remaining would then go through “physical, mental, and moral evaluation” and those who demonstrate that they are fit to serve will be selected for service, according to SSS.

-CNN

The National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 doesn’t even mention the First Amendment or the fundamental right of Americans to organize and protest

 

With the mainstream media distracted by the made-for-TV drama of James Comey’s indictment, Trump has signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” views as indicators of radical left violence. Called National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, it’s being referred to as “NSPM-7” by administration insiders.

“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle left wing terrorism,” Trump’s homeland security advisor Stephen Miller said, referring to the issuance.

To the extent that the major media noticed the directive at all, they (even C-SPAN!) incorrectly labeled it an “executive order,” like this week’s designation of “Antifa” as a domestic terrorist organization. The mainstream media is hopeless in the face of the complexity and secrecy of the national security state. It’s hard to overstate how much different NSPM-7 is from the over 200 executive orders Trump has frantically signed since coming back into office.

An executive order publicly lays out the course of day-to-day federal government operations; whereas a national security directive is a sweeping policy decree for the defense, foreign policy, intelligence, and law enforcement apparatus. National security directives are often secret, but in this case the Trump administration chose to publish NSPM-7 — only the seventh since he’s come into office.)

Previous national security directives have been controversial, even politically earthshaking. In 1980, for example, President Jimmy Carter signed the Top Secret Presidential Directive 59 (“PD-59”) directing new nuclear warfighting policies that persisted until the end of the Cold War. When revealed, PD-59 caused a public furor.

Declassified copy of PD-59 | Carter Library

Similarly, President George W. Bush signed a series of classified national security directives after 9/11, the most famous of which authorized NSA’s unlawful domestic intercepts, a directive that wasn’t publicly revealed until four years later.

In NSPM-7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” President Trump directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to fight his version of political violence in America, retooling a network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on “leftist” political violence in America. This vast counterterrorism army, made up of federal, state, and local agents would, as Trump aide Stephen Miller said, form “the central hub of that effort.”

NSPM-7 directs a new national strategy to “disrupt” any individual or groups “that foment political violence,” including “before they result in violent political acts.”

In other words, they’re targeting pre-crime, to reference Minority Report.

The Trump administration isn’t only targeting organizations or groups but even individuals and “entities” whom NSPM-7 says can be identified by any of the following “indicia” (indicators) of violence:

anti-Americanism,

anti-capitalism,

anti-Christianity,

support for the overthrow of the United States Government,

extremism on migration,

extremism on race,

extremism on gender

hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,

hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and

hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.

“The United States requires a national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts,” the directive states (emphasis mine).

A “pre-crime” endeavor, preventing attacks before they happen, is core to the post-9/11 concept of counterterrorism itself. No longer satisfied to investigate acts of terrorism after the fact to bring terrorists to justice, the Bush administration adopted preemption. Overseas, that led to aerial assassination by drones and “special operations” kill missions. Domestically, it led to a counter-terrorism campaign whose hallmark was excessive and illegal government surveillance and the use of undercover agents and “confidential human sources” to trap (and entrap) would-be terrorists.

Now, with Donald Trump’s directive retooling the counter-terror apparatus to go after Americans at home, this means monitoring political activity, or speech, as an investigative method to discover “radicalism.” (Contrary to other national security documents all during the post-Watergate era, NSPM-7 doesn’t even mention the First Amendment or the fundamental right of Americans to organize and protest.)

The focus on speech is evident throughout NSPM-7. The directive says that political violence is the result of “organized campaigns” that often begin (with the left) dehumanizing targets in “anonymous chat fora's, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions.”

To give a sense of how broad this formulation is, Trump’s earlier designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist group was accompanied by a White House fact sheet singling out people who “celebrated” Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last December. As I wrote at the time, this describes a lot of Americans!

Trump’s new national security memorandum also alludes to Mangione but adds to it even larger categories of potential targets.

NSPM-7 is fundamentally a law enforcement directive, and it dispenses with the complications of using the active-duty military or the National Guard in pursuit of political violence. It directs the Department of Justice to focus the FBI’s approximately 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) to the new mission.

The FBI network of task forces comprises over 4,000 members—including FBI personnel and task force officers (or TFOs) from more than 500 state and local agencies and 50 federal agencies, including special agents, police officers, intelligence analysts and surveillance technicians. First established in New York City in 1980 to systematize FBI and NYPD cooperation, today there are task forces around the country, including at least one in each of the FBI’s 55 field offices.

For the Trump White House, the beauty of using an already existing network is that it bypasses Congressional oversight and scrutiny and even obscures federal activity to governors and legislatures at the state level. States, cities, and local police have already signed Memoranda of Agreements with the feds to fight terrorism, and officers are already assigned as task force officers.

NSPM-7 says the JTTFs “shall investigate” potential federal crimes relating to “acts of recruiting or radicalizing persons” for the purpose of “political violence, terrorism, or conspiracy against rights; and the violent deprivation of any citizen’s rights.” It authorizes the JTTFs to investigate individuals, organizations, and funders “responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in the criminal conduct.”

“The Attorney General shall issue specific guidance that ensures domestic terrorism priorities include politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder,” NSPM-7 says. Civil disorder?

I don’t want to sound hyperbolic, but the plain truth is that NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda. Yes, it repeats the word “violent” over and over to purport only to go after citizens who are moved to take up arms, but it also directs monitoring and intelligence collection to map and target the new “evildoers,” to borrow a Bush label he took from the Bible just days after 9/11.

The partisan focus couldn’t be more obvious. “The real problem is this: since Charlie [Kirk] was murdered — a friend of mine, assassinated — nothing’s changed on their side,” White House counter-terrorism czar Sebastian Gorka told Newsmax after NSPM-7 was signed. “Not one leader —not one left wing thought leader, member of Congress, Senator — nobody has said we distance ourselves from the violent rhetoric. The left refuses to rid themselves of the justification for violence, and as such, President Trump is taking measures to protect us from the violent rhetoric that becomes snipers and bullets.”

-Ken Klippenstein

"Trump/Republican machinery of hate and suspicion"

Trump’s thought police may already have your name in their database, which is growing — according to Kash Patel — at the rate of around 300% right now. They’re not looking for people who’ve committed crimes, but, rather, for people who they think may commit crimes in the future. Thought and opinion crimes.

Yeah, like in the movie Minority Report, only with an Orwell 1984 twist. You could call it the FBI’s New Political Pre-Crime Center.

We shouldn’t be surprised, as horrific as this is. When wannabe dictators are elected to lead countries and want to end their democracies and impose absolute rule, they typically follow a simple series of steps, sometimes referred to as “The Dictator’s Playbook.” They:

— Purge government institutions of professionals and replace them with yes-men and groveling toadies.
— Strip their political party of anybody who’d even consider challenging them.
— Help friendly oligarchs buy up the nation’s primary media and turn it into a mouthpiece for the new regime, while directing billions in government contracts as recompense to those same men.
— Pack the courts so they and their buddies can crime without consequence while they drain the government of wealth.
— Build a separate, parallel police force loyal first and foremost to Dear Leader they can use to terrify the population and “keep order.” (Schutstaffel, Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Tonton Macoute, Central Nacional de Informaciones, Brigada Político-Social, KGB/FSB, ICE, etc.)

But key to their entire identity and supporting their base of power is their ability to identify “an enemy within” and convince enough of the population that these people represent such a danger to the nation that they must be suppressed. If you’re a democrat or lean that direction, that’s you and me. And that’s now.

Reporter Ken Klippenstein has been on this beat for a while, and his newsletter is well worth the read. He first identified the GOP’s hit list in Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, often referred to as “NSPM-7.” It identifies as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

Klippenstein then, three months later, discovered that the Trump regime — specifically, Bondi’s DOJ and Patel’s FBI — was already busily compiling lists of such potential terrorists, sharing the responsibility with some 200 FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) working collaboratively with local police departments across America.

And Bondi had instructed them to go back as far as five years in their scrubbing of social media and searching out our thoughts and opinions to find Americans who presumably may oppose Christianity, billionaires, or Tradwives.

But that was just the beginning.

Now, this week, Klippenstein has found that Patel has set up within the FBI a group — including 10 different federal investigative and police agencies — to “proactively” identify those of us who may disagree with their opinions about religion, gender, or capitalism.

The old “Terrorism Screening Center” set up in the wake of 9/11 to look for guys from Saudi Arabia who may want to learn to fly planes without landing them has been shut down and replaced with the “Threat Screening Center.”

And Bin Laden’s guys aren’t the “threat” they’re looking for: it’s those “potential domestic terrorists” who aren’t sufficiently Christian; who oppose the abuses and excesses of the “free market’s” unregulated no-holds-barred monopoly capitalism; and are or have friends who are queer or otherwise support the queer community.

One of the most troubling parts of the entire story is that America’s mainstream media appears to have no interest in this whatsoever, even though it appears right there in Trump’s new budget and is already up and operating within the DOJ and FBI.

And, ironically, reporters — particularly those for what Republicans call “liberal” publications and media outlets — would probably be among Patel’s prime targets. As Klippenstein notes: “Again, all of these developments have yielded virtually zero media attention.”

Which tosses the responsibility for letting Americans know about the new Schutstaffel that, come election time, may well be rounding up or at least “visiting” people on its list, to you and me. America was founded on the idea that your thoughts and opinions are your own, and the government has no business regulating them or punishing you for them. 

Under today’s GOP, Putin is writing our European/NATO foreign policy, Netanyahu is writing our Middle Eastern foreign policy, and now, it appears, the late George Orwell is writing our domestic policy.

The question, then, isn’t whether this is happening — it already is and they’re bragging about it — but whether we’ll tolerate it. If we continue to let the Trump regime and the GOP decide which thoughts and opinions are acceptable and which make you a criminal suspect, we’ve already given up the very freedoms our Constitution was written to protect.

Our answer has to be loud, visible, and relentless: sunlight, outrage, and actions like protesting, contacting our elected officials, and voting before the Trump/Republican machinery of hate and suspicion becomes a permanent new normal in America.

-Thom Hartmann

Killing History: DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declares the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional

 

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

―George Orwell, 1984

Enacted in 1978, in the wake of Watergate, the Presidential Records Act (PRA) makes all records created or received by the President, Vice President, and their staff in the course of official duties the property of the United States government. They are explicitly not the personal property of the officials whose desks they cross. The law mandates they be transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) as soon as a President leaves office.

Remember the stories during Trump’s first term in office about how he would tear his papers up into tiny shreds, forcing his staff to retrieve them and tape them back together? That happened because of the PRA.

The PRA is the law. It’s clear. Presidents are advised about the requirement when they take office. So, the reports that Trump was destroying his records should have been taken as an early warning sign of his utter disregard for the law. Instead, they were treated more like a cute affectation, a sign that this was an outsider who was new to being a political insider. At most, he was a little difficult to work for.

The report in Politico began like this: Solomon Lartey spent the first five months of the Trump administration working in the Old Executive Office Building, standing over a desk with scraps of paper spread out in front of him.

Lartey, who earned an annual salary of $65,969 as a records management analyst, was a career government official with close to 30 years under his belt. But he had never seen anything like this in any previous administration he had worked for. He had never had to tape the president’s papers back together again.

Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.

Trump seems to have learned a lesson from all of this, but it’s the wrong one. That perception may also have been shaped when the National Archives contacted him after he left office to seek the return of classified documents still in his possession. We all know how that ended up. So, this term, Trump had his law firm, the government agency formerly known as the Justice Department, issue an opinion declaring the PRA unconstitutional. You can find it here, running to 52 pages.

“You have asked,” it begins, “whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (“PRA” or “Act”) is constitutional.” The answer follows immediately: “We conclude that it is not.” There are two reasons, either of which, standing on its own, would have been sufficient to undo the PRA. The opinion explains that they are “interlocking.” 

The Act “exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers”, and it also “aggrandizes the Legislative Branch at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy of the Executive.” In other words, we’re watching another power grab by this administration, a stratagem to expand the power of the executive at the expense of Congress, while claiming it’s the other way around.

That opinion came from the Office of Legal Counsel at DOJ. Part of that office’s job is to provide legal advice to the President and executive branch agencies. It issues formal opinions; reviews proposed executive orders and legislation for constitutionality and resolves legal disputes within the executive branch. Its decisions are authoritative and they bind executive branch employees, not just the folks at DOJ.

The current Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Division is T. Elliot Gaiser. He clerked for a trifecta of Federalist Society hardliners: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, Judge Neomi Rao on the D.C. Circuit, and Judge Edith Jones on the Fifth Circuit. He graduated from Hillsdale College, known for its conservative Christian principles. Gaiser became Ohio’s solicitor general in 2023 and was billed by the state’s Republican AG at the time as “a master craftsman of ironclad legal arguments rooted in originalist principles and constitutional restraint.”

Gaiser’s opinion regarding the PRA concludes that it “unconstitutionally intrudes on the independence and autonomy of the President.” The result is that “the President need not further comply with its dictates.” But the Supreme Court held that a nearly identical law was constitutional almost 50 years ago when President Nixon, upon leaving office, challenged the first version of the PRA. The OLC opinion fails to explain why that case is no longer good precedent. Gaiser seems to have simply, with the stroke of a pen, overruled the Supreme Court.

The American Historical Society (AHA) and American Oversight, a nonprofit that promotes transparency in government, promptly sued. They begin by writing, “This case is about the preservation of records that document our nation’s history, and whether the American people are able to access and learn from that history.” 

They explain that both plaintiff organizations and their members “rely heavily on access to historical records about the inner workings of the federal government to undertake their missions” and that their ability to do their work “will be significantly harmed by Defendants’ actions.”

The AHA explains that if the PRA comes to an end, they will no longer have access to the information that makes it possible for them to “create the historical record of presidential activities,” which would leave them with an “incomplete historical record by which to professionally research, produce scholarship on, and teach U.S. history.” 

They point out that once lost, the records and the opportunity to record history are gone. AHA has some gravitas in this regard: It was their 1910 request to Congress following the discovery that many records from the 1800s were missing that ultimately led to the creation of the National Archives, according to their lawsuit.

The case will be heard by federal District Judge Beryl Howell in the District of Columbia. The plaintiffs are asking the court to declare that OLC got it wrong and that the PRA is constitutional. They want an injunction that will prevent Trump from taking Presidential records away with him when his time in office comes to an end. The relief they are asking for would explicitly prevent him from relying on the OLC opinion.

The Justice Department will have to defend its opinion in court. Judge Howell has already ruled against the Trump administration in two cases: one involving a law firm Trump targeted by an executive order, and another rejecting the government’s assertion that it could make warrantless immigration arrests in cases where there was no evidence the target was a flight risk. 

Previously, she ruled in 2019 that DOJ had to turn over sealed grand jury evidence from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation to House investigators. In her opinion, she called the arguments the administration mustered to oppose releasing the evidence a "farce."

None of these cases presupposes how she will rule in the current one; the issues before her are different. But she has a strong predilection for enforcing the bounds of the executive branch’s constitutional authority—the issue that will be presented here. Intuitively, it makes sense to preserve our history. The question the administration should have to answer here is: Why wouldn’t it?

Back to Orwell: “Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Thank you for supporting Civil Discourse and helping to create a community of well-informed people who care about the future of democracy. Your paid subscriptions make it possible for me to do this kind of analysis consistently—and to keep it accessible for a broader audience.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

"A Moral Obscenity": Trump Budget Pairs Record Military Boost with Billions in Cuts to Social Programs

Donald Trump’s White House released a budget proposal on Friday that pairs an unprecedented, debt-exploding $1.5 trillion in military spending with tens of billions of dollars in cuts to domestic agencies and education, healthcare, climate, and housing programs.  

Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2027, which must be approved by Congress, includes $73 billion in total cuts to nondefense spending while boosting military outlays by 42%—or nearly $500 billion—compared to current levels.      

Programs cut or eliminated in the proposed budget—under the guise of slashing “woke programs” and “ending the Green New Scam”—include the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice program, Community Services Block Grants, electric vehicle charging subsidies, renewable energy initiatives at the Interior Department, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing.

The budget proposal also calls for cuts to the already-depleted Internal Revenue Service, without offering specific figures. One budget expert noted that, if enacted, the White House’s requested cuts would bring nondefense discretionary spending to “its lowest level in the modern era.” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote in response to Trump’s request that “to pay for his endless wars, he wants the biggest increase to military spending in 70 years.” “How does he pay for it? Cuts to ‘education, health, housing, and more,’” Casar added. “Hell no.”

Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, said in a statement that “the Trump-Vought budget proposal is a moral obscenity,” referring to Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget.

“The $500 billion annual increase in proposed Pentagon spending—if it were instead deployed humanely—would be enough to solve or meaningfully address the nation’s great problems, from healthcare to daycare, from the climate crisis to affordable housing, from improving schools to making college education affordable,” said Weissman. “Instead, Trump and Vought propose to spend an unfathomable amount on a Pentagon that can’t even pass an audit to further empower an out-of-control and incompetent leader in Pete Hegseth.”

“As usual, the priorities of the people are simply unimportant to this administration as they think about spending our taxpayer dollars,” Weissman continued. “Republicans and Democrats in Congress should treat this proposal with all the care it deserves and immediately hit delete.”

“Trump said that our country cannot afford to help families with childcare or healthcare—but his own budget proves what a ridiculous farce that is.”

The White House unveiled its budget request days after Trump said it is “not possible” for the federal government “to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things” because “we’re fighting wars,” comments that observers viewed as a stark summary of the administration’s priorities.

“Trump is telling the American people our country somehow can’t afford childcare, Medicaid, and Medicare, but is never too stretched to fund wars of choice,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said in a statement Friday. “He is wrong. We are the wealthiest country in the world and can absolutely afford to both defend and invest in the American people.”

“The president is now demanding a massive increase in defense spending, including a $350 billion slush fund for his reckless war with Iran, while cutting billions from healthcare, education, housing, and more. This budget represents ‘America Last,’” said Boyle. “I will be demanding answers from White House OMB Director Russell Vought when he testifies at the House Budget Committee on April 15.”

The Trump White House is calling on Congress to approve a significant chunk—roughly $350 billion—of its proposed military budget increase via the filibuster-proof reconciliation process, which would allow Republicans to push the funding through without any Democratic support. The new budget request also calls for a “historic investment” in the Department of Homeland Security, which has been partially shut down for more than a month as Democrats push for reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“This funding would come in addition to the $170 billion passed just last year that has enabled the deaths of migrants in detention centers, the detention of children, and the deaths of US citizens at the hands of mass deportation agents,” Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project, said in response to the budget request.

“The president looked at the country, with our rising gas prices and nearly half of us struggling to afford basic necessities and decided what we really need is a bigger war budget,” said Koshgarian. “Not healthcare or childcare or relief from high prices or expensive housing, but a nearly bottomless budget for whatever wars his cronies and the contractors dream up next.”

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams