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koganbotIf Trump and Musk and their people continue to defy judicial orders, what will happen and what do we do about it?
I mean, what do we do now? What do we do in the next ten days? These are genuine questions. I'm looking for guidance.
I'm not a political writer and I don't have ideas you can't get elsewhere, but I'm a good writer so maybe throwing thoughts onto the screen here will jostle something among the fifteen or so people who read this. Or maybe you'll feel – I don't know – less isolated? More prepared? More scared? Anyway, I'm drawing on Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Paul Krugman (Substack), so I recommend you read them.
Overnight (that's about 24 hrs ago now) I read a piece in the Washington Post that made me think that the next 10 days or so will be critical to whether Trump gets to set up a framework for a dictatorship. Not that if he falls short now he won't succeed later, but there's danger right now.
The WashPost piece ended up getting folded into a larger one, and if the original is still on the site I can't figure out where (here's the longer) and they both fell off the page in the flood of news. What it said was that District Judge John J. McConnell, who'd originally ordered the administration to stop its freeze on federal grants, had found that the administration had, in fact, not unfrozen those grants as he had ordered. So he was again ordering the administration to unfreeze the funds.*
And this is it, our Lexington-Concord. I'm baffled that the issue isn't getting a larger slice of the news screen. Maybe few others feel my 10 days – there are about 40 judgments telling the administration to halt, don't know if the Trump-Musk crew are ignoring or defying them all, or are pretending to comply on some of them or what.
Anyway, bearing in mind that I don't really know the law, the political situation, how federal payment systems work, or what I'm talking about, this is the risk:
If the administration gets away with ignoring the courts, so ignoring the orders to stop DOGE's access to Treasury and health payment systems – so Musk's access continues – this is what I foresee. Musk and his confederates not only continue to block payments to congressionally authorized projects that they don't like but also block payments owed to contractors – say, block payments to contractors unless the contractors donate to the Republican party – or simply don't send salary payments to VA doctors and nurses in areas that vote Blue, and don't send funds owed to hospitals in such areas, and they close the buildings that judges who've ruled against them work in, or withhold their salaries, or loot the bank accounts of such judges (at least the ones who've ever gotten a tax refund, so their routing numbers and account numbers are now on Musk's server). Or delay or not send tax refunds owed to members of a liberal advocacy group or to people who work at a disfavored business firm. Or simply not pay disability benefits to people who express dissenting political views, or to people whose relatives have.
Anyway, I don't know how federal payments work, don't know how easy or hard this is to do. For that matter, even if there were no DOGE, over time the Trump administration could corrupt all the relevant institutions. But the Trump people seem to want to be forcing the issue early. And what's key to me is that they can do these things if they can get away with defying or ignoring judges' orders. Right now we seem to be relying on judges and on states attorneys general to block this impending dictatorship. I want to know what effective social and political support we can give to those judges and attorneys general, to show them we have their back. I mean, in the next ten days! This post began as a letter to one of my senators, Michael Bennet of Colorado. I don't follow congress and senators well enough to really know, but he's a Democrat, something of an oddball and not always right, but he's courageous. Writing to him and Jason Crow and to Hickenlooper is what I can think of to do, so that's what I'm doing. Seeing what I can manage to fit on a single page.
Wondering somehow if I could reach some moderate or conservative somewhere, to convince them that their own life and freedom are at risk too... They'll probably think that I'm hysterical with what I wrote here. Well, I'm extrapolating from what Trump tried to do to Zelensky in 2019, what Trump got impeached for, telling Zelensky that he wouldn't release the funds that congress had authorized for Ukraine unless Zelensky lied and said that Ukraine was investigating Joe Biden for corruption. I'm hypothesizing that what Trump tried to do to Zelensky he'll try to do to you, too. (Some of what I wrote is just copying Krugman, btw.)
Also, for what it's worth, in the long run I think democracy is going to win and Trump and Musk are going to lose,** that they've misjudged badly and weakened their efforts. Well, that's what Ezra Klein thinks and I'm parroting him but in my own vocabulary, obviously. Trump and Musk don't really know how to take control and run a government, so they're waving their dicks around trying to convince themselves that they do. But it's better if we can counter them now, at least semi-successfully, rather than after years of protest and civil disorder and pain and suffering to millions. I mean, there will be pain and suffering; Trump won the election and is going to do a lot of damage. But there can be less, the more successfully we act – even if I don't really have much of an idea what to do.
*Here's a piece, oddly seems to be on a site in India, which contains a bit of interesting information, a piece of law I didn't know, which was in the original WashPost article but that didn't make it into the later amalgam. It's the final sentence, "The judge further added that White House officials were required to comply with the directive, regardless of their expectations about the case’s outcome." So saying that you think you're going to prevail at a higher judicial level doesn't get you out of following the restraining order now, and facing contempt charges if you don't follow it, even if your argument about funding does eventually win.
**But then, I thought Harris was going to win, too.
I mean, what do we do now? What do we do in the next ten days? These are genuine questions. I'm looking for guidance.
I'm not a political writer and I don't have ideas you can't get elsewhere, but I'm a good writer so maybe throwing thoughts onto the screen here will jostle something among the fifteen or so people who read this. Or maybe you'll feel – I don't know – less isolated? More prepared? More scared? Anyway, I'm drawing on Ezra Klein (New York Times) and Paul Krugman (Substack), so I recommend you read them.
Overnight (that's about 24 hrs ago now) I read a piece in the Washington Post that made me think that the next 10 days or so will be critical to whether Trump gets to set up a framework for a dictatorship. Not that if he falls short now he won't succeed later, but there's danger right now.
The WashPost piece ended up getting folded into a larger one, and if the original is still on the site I can't figure out where (here's the longer) and they both fell off the page in the flood of news. What it said was that District Judge John J. McConnell, who'd originally ordered the administration to stop its freeze on federal grants, had found that the administration had, in fact, not unfrozen those grants as he had ordered. So he was again ordering the administration to unfreeze the funds.*
And this is it, our Lexington-Concord. I'm baffled that the issue isn't getting a larger slice of the news screen. Maybe few others feel my 10 days – there are about 40 judgments telling the administration to halt, don't know if the Trump-Musk crew are ignoring or defying them all, or are pretending to comply on some of them or what.
Anyway, bearing in mind that I don't really know the law, the political situation, how federal payment systems work, or what I'm talking about, this is the risk:
If the administration gets away with ignoring the courts, so ignoring the orders to stop DOGE's access to Treasury and health payment systems – so Musk's access continues – this is what I foresee. Musk and his confederates not only continue to block payments to congressionally authorized projects that they don't like but also block payments owed to contractors – say, block payments to contractors unless the contractors donate to the Republican party – or simply don't send salary payments to VA doctors and nurses in areas that vote Blue, and don't send funds owed to hospitals in such areas, and they close the buildings that judges who've ruled against them work in, or withhold their salaries, or loot the bank accounts of such judges (at least the ones who've ever gotten a tax refund, so their routing numbers and account numbers are now on Musk's server). Or delay or not send tax refunds owed to members of a liberal advocacy group or to people who work at a disfavored business firm. Or simply not pay disability benefits to people who express dissenting political views, or to people whose relatives have.
Anyway, I don't know how federal payments work, don't know how easy or hard this is to do. For that matter, even if there were no DOGE, over time the Trump administration could corrupt all the relevant institutions. But the Trump people seem to want to be forcing the issue early. And what's key to me is that they can do these things if they can get away with defying or ignoring judges' orders. Right now we seem to be relying on judges and on states attorneys general to block this impending dictatorship. I want to know what effective social and political support we can give to those judges and attorneys general, to show them we have their back. I mean, in the next ten days! This post began as a letter to one of my senators, Michael Bennet of Colorado. I don't follow congress and senators well enough to really know, but he's a Democrat, something of an oddball and not always right, but he's courageous. Writing to him and Jason Crow and to Hickenlooper is what I can think of to do, so that's what I'm doing. Seeing what I can manage to fit on a single page.
Wondering somehow if I could reach some moderate or conservative somewhere, to convince them that their own life and freedom are at risk too... They'll probably think that I'm hysterical with what I wrote here. Well, I'm extrapolating from what Trump tried to do to Zelensky in 2019, what Trump got impeached for, telling Zelensky that he wouldn't release the funds that congress had authorized for Ukraine unless Zelensky lied and said that Ukraine was investigating Joe Biden for corruption. I'm hypothesizing that what Trump tried to do to Zelensky he'll try to do to you, too. (Some of what I wrote is just copying Krugman, btw.)
Also, for what it's worth, in the long run I think democracy is going to win and Trump and Musk are going to lose,** that they've misjudged badly and weakened their efforts. Well, that's what Ezra Klein thinks and I'm parroting him but in my own vocabulary, obviously. Trump and Musk don't really know how to take control and run a government, so they're waving their dicks around trying to convince themselves that they do. But it's better if we can counter them now, at least semi-successfully, rather than after years of protest and civil disorder and pain and suffering to millions. I mean, there will be pain and suffering; Trump won the election and is going to do a lot of damage. But there can be less, the more successfully we act – even if I don't really have much of an idea what to do.
*Here's a piece, oddly seems to be on a site in India, which contains a bit of interesting information, a piece of law I didn't know, which was in the original WashPost article but that didn't make it into the later amalgam. It's the final sentence, "The judge further added that White House officials were required to comply with the directive, regardless of their expectations about the case’s outcome." So saying that you think you're going to prevail at a higher judicial level doesn't get you out of following the restraining order now, and facing contempt charges if you don't follow it, even if your argument about funding does eventually win.
**But then, I thought Harris was going to win, too.
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CROSSPOST: https://koganbot.substack.com/p/what-do-we-do-if-trump-and-musk-continue
