Elon Musk And JD Vance Can't Wait To Make A Constitutional Crisis!
Who's going to be the first to violate a court order? Step right up!
Hey, what’s that pile of butthair JD Vance been up to lately? Oh not much, just declaring that whatever the Holy Unitary Executive Branch does is constitutional, and courts are not allowed to do dick-diddly to stop conservatives from breaking the government’s kneecaps with a crowbar.
Unless, presumably, they are Judge Aileen Cannon telling Joe Biden’s DOJ what to do. Now that was some fine good lawyerin’!
On Saturday another judge blocked DOGE minions from meddling in Treasury Department records with sensitive information, and Donald Trump, Vance and Elon Musk’s gender-affirming hair growth treatments are super pissed about it.
Update, the DOJ is URGENTLY appealing this ruling. Oh, and admits in a footnote on page six that the DOGE staffer who resigned for being hair-scorchingly racist actually did NOT just have “read only” access, but also “a copy of certain BFS payments systems’ source code in a ‘sandbox’ environment.” HUH.
Anyway, Xitted Vance:
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal. Judges aren't allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Oh, just out here announcing that the plan is to break the law, I guess.
Judges do those things all the time, as guy-who-went-to-law-school full well knows, and is pretending not to know for the sake of fascism. Really, judges can’t check executive branch power at all now? It’s cool to send Taylor Swift to a prison in El Salvador for making The Leader sad? Shoot Trump’s political enemies on Fifth Avenue? Executive-order-end the Federal Reserve and dissolve the Federal Reserve Board? Refuse to leave office and name Junior as successor and ruler for life?
Vance also re-Xitted a post from a Harvard law professor: “Judicial interference with legitimate acts of state, especially the internal functioning of a co-equal branch, is a violation of the separation of powers.”
Violating the separation of powers sure does seem to be the plan they’ve had all along. On a podcast in 2021, Vance opined: “And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Elon is fuming too:
After the Supreme Court released that bonkers precedent-free “the President has immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he does as president” opinion, who the hell knows what a certain six SCOTUS justices might do about non-presidential Executive Branch over-reachy things. But Vance and company sure would like to cause a constitutional crisis and find out!
Still, even the DOGE squad seems aware that the presidential-criminal-immunity thing likely won’t boundlessly extend to randos who break rules, no matter how much Trump approves of it. There’s no exception in the law that lets the Executive Branch do things like allow a 19-year-old hacker with no security clearance who goes by “Big Balls” get access to everybody’s tax returns. Which is why White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and administration lawyers have been claiming that the DOGE squad merely has read-only access to systems, even as the DOGE squad has been non-stop bragging on Twitter about how they’re going in and deleting departments. There would be no (valid) “just following orders” defense for Big Balls if he defied a court order and accessed systems again.
But hey, Big Balls! JD Vance thinks you should channel your inner Andrew Jackson, defy that court order and go back in to the Treasury Department’s systems, so we can see if a judge will enforce it! Go for it, Big Balls!
So far this administration’s “flood the zone with bullshit” has been having its ass handed to it by courts. Sending Venezuelan immigrants to Guantanamo, blocked. Funding freeze, federal-worked buyout, birthright citizenship, sending transgender women to men’s prisons, dismantling USAID, DOGE boys in the Treasury payment system, all blocked. And so far the administration seems to be mostly obeying court orders, though many Head Start programs are still unable to access funds, though Health and Human Services is blaming that on “technical issues.”
Still, seems like that constitutional crisis will be coming round the mountain sooner or later. At some point this administration is going to defy a judge’s order. They might be doing that this minute, for all we know! And what will happen then? We shall see, and Musk and Vance can barely wait.
[The Hill / Axios / The New Republic]
OT: A judge has just told the Fetid Fascist "NO!" regarding his latest spending cuts just moments ago. The court insists that they MUST unfreeze these federal funds.
Muskrat and Hairpie Hillbilly need to be destroyed so thoroughly that they won't even merit an embarrassing footnote on Wikipedia.