RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-legal-trick-being-used-to-trip?utm_campaign=260347&utm_source=cross-post&r=8t06w&utm_medium=email

Judges are issuing orders that block government policies from taking effect anywhere in the country. Jed Rubenfeld explains what to do about them.

It’s been a relatively good week for President Donald Trump when it comes to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled more or less in his favor on three different challenges, including upholding on jurisdictional grounds his deportations of migrants to El Salvador. But the most pressing legal issue for Trump—the “nationwide injunctions” that have hamstrung many administration priorities—remains unresolved.

According to one count, only some 27 “nationwide injunctions”—orders issued by judges that block government policies from taking effect anywhere in the country—were issued throughout the twentieth century. Yet against Trump, counting both administrations, judges have so far handed down at least 79.

Supporters of these injunctions claim that they are a necessary check on unconstitutional actions by the administration, such as Trump’s moves to end birthright citizenship. The White House and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill say that district court judges are subverting the will of the people and want the Supreme Court to limit or halt the issuance of these injunctions.

Who is right? Let’s take it one step at a time. What are nationwide injunctions? Are they really being used against Trump more than other presidents? And are they legal?

The term nationwide injunction—a.k.a. “universal injunction”—has no legal definition, but it generally refers to a judicial order prohibiting the government from enforcing a measure anywhere in the country. That means that the ruling goes beyond the particular plaintiffs who brought the case, effectively allowing district courts to halt a policy from being applied anywhere in the U.S.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/09/the-word-went-out-get-trump/

It’s fair to ask how Donald Trump went from celebrity real estate developer to the man most detested by about half of Western society. We think we know this vilification happened.

Read on.

In 1949, William Randolph Hearst, owner of the largest newspaper chain in the U.S., sent a two-word message to his editors: “Puff Graham.” It made evangelist Billy Graham, in Los Angeles for one of his early crusades, into “an instant celebrity nationwide,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

“The sudden front-page coverage showered on Graham by Hearst newspapers in mid-October (after three weeks of little notice) was quickly matched by other newspapers and news magazines – literally a media circus descending on his rallies under a big tent,” says the Times.

Graham’s fame soared as he later appeared on the covers of the day’s leading magazines, from Time to Newsweek to Life.

The Billy Graham Library calls Hearst’s order “a watershed event,” and Graham himself thanked Hearst in a letter, telling him that “Literally millions of church people across the nation are rejoicing and thanking God for your interest and backing of the recent Los Angeles evangelistic campaign.”

We don’t discount the possibility of divine intervention, but Graham’s popularity is owed in large part to the power and reach of one man (who might have been moved divinely to “puff” the evangelist).

No postings until I return on April 10

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/democrats-demand-accountability-for-signal-leak-after-giving-a-pass-to-biden-clinton-administrations/

Signalgate Critics Overlook Democrats’ Own Failures

After Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly included in a Signal chat of top Trump administration officials discussing an upcoming attack on the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Politico Playbook boldly claimed that there is “no administration in the world” where a “blunder of these proportions happens and nobody gets fired or resigns.”

“Not in London. Not in Moscow. Not in Tokyo. Not in Pyongyang. Nowhere,” the outlet underscored.

Playbook’s author missed at least one glaring example: President Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, which cost the lives of 13 service members but did not result in a single firing.

CNBC host Joe Kernen brought up the Biden administration’s abysmal withdrawal during an interview with Senator Mark Warner (D., Va.), who actually laughed off the comparison.

During an appearance on Squawk Box, Warner dismissed those who voiced concerns about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and former President Joe Biden’s “incompetence,” saying the Trump administration was no better.

But Kernan noted the air strikes against the Houthis were a success, while Biden failed disastrously in Afghanistan.

“You remember the Biden administration started with the biggest f-up in history with Afghanistan and 13 dead Americans,” Kernen said. “Let’s not get too sanctimonious and high and mighty about screwing up.”

Warner laughed and said, “Should we go back to even to—”

“That’s only four years [ago], senator!” Kernen interrupted.

Fox News also reported on Warner’s hypocrisy on the issue, with the senator having used the Signal app himself to work with a lobbyist for a Russian oligarch to connect with the disgraced Steele dossier author.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/03/31/musk-demolishes-medias-trump-dictator-fantasy-n4938443

Elon Musk headlined a town hall in Green Bay, Wisc., on Sunday evening, just days before Wisconsin voters decide a pivotal state Supreme Court race. During the event, Musk underscored his opposition to activist judges by signing two $1 million checks to supporters of an online petition against judicial overreach. Wearing a Wisconsin cheesehead, which he later autographed and tossed into the crowd, Musk used the event to highlight the stakes in the election between conservative candidate Brad Schimel and Democrat-backed Susan Crawford.

During his speech, he also sharply criticized the media’s treatment of President Trump, calling out the absurdity of comparisons between Trump and some of history’s most notorious dictators. Musk argued that such hyperbole reveals both a political agenda and a fundamental failure in historical education.

“They’ve called President Trump every name in the book,” Musk said. “I think there was one article that called the president worse than Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin combined.”

Musk dismissed such comparisons as not only ridiculous but also factually indefensible. “Uh, actually, President Trump has not killed anyone,” he said. “In fact, he’s very good at stopping wars — not starting them.”

Musk’s comments reflect a growing frustration with the left-wing media’s efforts to demonize Trump, often with exaggerated and unfounded claims. The idea that leftists could equate Trump with mass-murdering dictators, Musk suggested, exposes a serious lack of historical knowledge among those making these arguments.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/01/trump-starts-undoing-jfks-worst-mistake/

While Democrats were busy hyperventilating over the nothingburger “Signal scandal,” President Donald Trump quietly took an action that could do more to drain the swamp – and Democratic Party finances – than any other action he’s taken to date.

On Thursday, Trump signed an executive order that ends collective bargaining rights for most federal workers, a move that “is a magnitude of tenfold on what they’ve done so far on their attack of the federal workforce and the labor movement,” Cathy Creighton, director of Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab, told the Washington Post.

Actually, it is the first step toward righting a wrong committed by President John Kennedy in 1962 when he signed an executive order allowing federal workers the right to collectively bargain. Up until then, politicians on both sides of the aisle agreed that letting government workers unionize was a terrible idea.

Even the sainted FDR attacked the idea as “unthinkable and intolerable,” saying that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

But Kennedy needed to pay unions back for their crucial support in his narrow election victory and, once he did so, union membership among federal workers soared. In 1978, Congress turned Kennedy’s executive order into law with the Civil Service Reform Act, which had the strong support of the American Federation of Government Employees.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/31/reflections-on-the-counter-revolution-in-america/

When Donald Trump entered office, he faced a number of choices that had confronted the last three Republican presidents, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. They all had the choice to either shrink government and reduce deficits or slow government growth while cutting taxes.

They had the choice of using American power to restore deterrence by invading belligerents (e.g., Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan) or targeting enemies without deploying ground troops to change governments.

Republicans could either impose tariffs to ensure trade balances and fair trade or argue that free, even if unfair, trade was in the U.S.’s interest by lowering consumer prices, keeping domestic producers competitive, and assuming foreign subsidies were unsustainable.

They had the choice to either reverse the left-wing domination of culture or moderate its fated influence.

They could have shut down the open border and eliminated illegal immigration or publicly condemned it while tacitly maintaining an influx of hundreds of thousands per year for the corporate world, rather than millions.

In general, no Republican president of the past 50 years sought to radically reduce the size of government and balance the budget. None closed the border and began deportations. None avoided optional ground wars while solely hitting aggressors from the air. None led a cultural counter-revolution to reverse the left’s long march through our institutions.

Why?

Because to have done so would have constituted a veritable cultural counter-revolution that would incur an unacceptable level of hatred and resistance from the entrenched left—defined by the nexus of the media, bureaucracies, campuses, foundations, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the Democratic Party. The latter were deemed just too formidable—and dangerous—to confront in a single term, if ever.

Or so it was felt by prior Republican administrations. So, most stayed clear and sought to deregulate, cut taxes, keep illegal immigration to about 30,000 or so a month, and use rhetoric to oppose the left’s cultural revolution.

Not so with Trump. The target of four years of lawfare in his wilderness years, he has now become a true counterrevolutionary determined not to slow down the progressive trajectory of the last 60 years but to end it and return the U.S. to the center—at least as now defined by a balanced budget, reciprocal fair trade, full use of all modes of energy, a closed border, legal only immigration, no optional ground wars abroad and a fierce effort to end the woke/DEI/ESG/Green New Deal leftwing orthodoxy.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/judges-vs-america-how-the-deep-state-is-overruling-your-vote/

Another day, another judicial blockade. Three more executive orders—each designed to advance the will of the American people—were unceremoniously put on ice by unelected black-robed obstructionists yesterday. That brings the total to 15 since President Trump took office in January 2025. That’s 15 direct assaults on the policies Americans voted for when they rejected the corruption and incompetence of the radical left.

Let’s be clear: This isn’t about “the law,” “checks and balances,” or “democracy” (a term the left constantly redefines). This is about deep-state operatives and activist judges blocking reform, hamstringing the administration’s efforts to clean up the mess left behind by Biden’s regime. The same establishment class that spent four years ignoring open borders, skyrocketing inflation, and a weaponized FBI now insists that every procedural technicality be followed before President Trump can act.

Consider what was just blocked. Among the three executive orders frozen yesterday was one expediting the deportation of violent criminal aliens, another targeting the corruption that allows bureaucrats to profit from their positions, and a third cracking down on federal grants abused by activist organizations masquerading as nonprofits.

Let me repeat that: judges intervened to stop the removal of dangerous criminals, protect corrupt bureaucrats, and ensure taxpayer money keeps flowing to left-wing political groups.

Someone, somewhere, please explain to me what law requires America to fund its own destruction. I’ll wait.

Of course, there is no such law. What we’re seeing is a coordinated legal resistance—engineered by well-funded leftist legal outfits, cheered on by corporate media, and rubber-stamped by judges who treat the Constitution as a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. The game is “Lawfare,” an endless stream of lawsuits designed to bog down the administration, tie up policies in court, and hope Trump runs out of time.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21511/trump-musk-restoration

The ultimate goal of this new oligarchy is to privatize government, a concept that is anathema to European intellectuals who regard the Hobbesian state as an earthly version of divinity.

To Americans, however, the Leviathan, though accepted as a necessity, has always been regarded as a potential threat to freedoms that their ancestors sought as they fled from European tyrannies.

Whether their restoration scheme works or not remains to be seen. But to question its legitimacy is a sign of sour grapes by European gurus who witness their politically correct world crumbling around them.

“Why is Donald Trump doing what he is doing?” This is the question raised by European intelligentsia these days as they try to recover from the shock of the American presidential election, which they all believed would be won by the Democrat champion Kamala Harris.

France’s currently fashionable TV philosopher Michel Onfray raises the question in a number of programs, as do op-ed writers in newspapers in London, Brussels and Berlin, and Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis.

The answer to the question may be simple: Trump is doing what he is doing because he promised to do those things and has a contract with the 78 million Americans who voted for him.