<[Event "First Boston Futurity"] [Site "Boston Mass"]
[Date "1981.04.??"]
[EventDate "1981"]
[Round "3"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Leverett, Bruce"]
[Black "Sulman, Robert M"]
[ECO "E42"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<The stark possibility of President Donald Trump potentially ignoring a court order sparked by his administration’s foreign aid freeze could explode into a full-on constitutional crisis — “and effectively end the republic,” Rachel Maddow said Thursday night as she delivered an ominous warning to viewers.

“They have been joking about this and making, you know, macho sounding bluffs about this for a long time now – particularly from the vice president – J.D. Vance,” Maddow said Thursday. “How is the Supreme Court going to deal with it now that it's real?”

The MSNBC host delved into possible scenarios in the opening minutes of her top-rated show that could develop depending on how the Supreme Court weighs in on the very real prospect that Trump could openly defy a court order – what she described as a “very scary issue.”

The high court, whose ultra-conservative majority was hand selected by Trump, is set to take up the case Friday at the request of government attorneys eager to find a way out of U.S. District Judge Amir Ali’s order to unfreeze funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

“Do they try to give him what he wants from the courts so that Trump doesn't break that glass? Doesn't, you know, smash through the brightest bright line that we have and effectively end the republic?” she pondered. “Do they appease him because they – ‘oh, he's so scary, we better not make him defy a court order – we better make sure all court orders go his way.’”

She continued to preview the impending Supreme Court showdown by imagining an alternate situation where the justices use the opportunity “to make clear to him that his powers as president actually don't allow him to defy the court.”

“Do they tell him that if he does try to defy the courts, he is effectively declaring war on the United States of America? We'll see,” she added.

Maddow told viewers to keep their “eyes wide open on that and take it with all the seriousness it deserves.”>

<[Event "16th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1988.07.??"]
[EventDate "1988"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "0-1"]
[White "Fedorowicz, John"]
[Black "Dlugy, Maxim"]
[ECO "B66"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 d6 6.Bg5 e6 7.Qd2 a6 8.O-O-O h6 9.Be3 Nxd4 10.Bxd4 b5 11.f4 Bb7 12.Qe3 Be7 13.Bxf6 gxf6 14.Kb1 Qa5 15.Bd3 b4 16.Ne2 Qc5 17.Qh3 a5 18.f5 e5 19.Qf3 a4 20.b3 Bd8 21.Bc4 Bb6 22.Rd2 axb3 23.Bxb3 Rd8 24.Rhd1 Ke7 25.Qh5 Rh7 26.Ng3 Qe3 27.Rd3 Qg5 28.Qf3 Ba6 29.Rd5 h5 30.Nf1 Qg4 31.Nd2 Be2 32.Qxg4 hxg4 33.Re1 Ba6 34.Bc4 Bxc4 35.Nxc4 Bc5 36.Rh1 Rdh8 37.Rd3 Rxh2 38.Rxh2 Rxh2 39.Rg3 Rh4 40.Ne3 Rh1+ 41.Kb2 Bd4+ 42.Kb3 Rb1+ 43.Kc4 Bxe3 44.Rxe3 Rb2 45.Re2 Kd7 46.Kb5 Kc7 47.Rd2 Rxa2 48.Kxb4 Kc6 49.Re2 Ra1 50.Re3 Rd1 51.Rc3+ Kd7 52.Re3 Rd2 0-1>

<The budget framework House Republicans approved on Tuesday sets the stage for a massive number of cuts to federal programs, many of which directly help their voters. It’s a bold decision for a party whose members were already facing pushback from angry constituents at raucous town halls in safely red congressional districts. The decision to muscle through the bill — regardless of the resulting hardships — shows congressional Republicans are willing to roll the dice on their supporters’ pain not becoming a political problem for them.

It was no small feat that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., managed to get his fractious caucus to all back a single bill that smashes together most of the Trump administration’s legislative agenda.

The budget blueprint lays the groundwork for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, while also boosting spending on immigration enforcement and the military by $100 billion. In an entirely lopsided tradeoff, Republicans are also aiming for $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade, with a major chunk coming from the $880 billion poised to be stripped from federal programs under the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s purview.

In short, it’s exactly the sort of punishing demolition of the social safety net that Republicans have been promising for over a decade now — and that has proved to be deeply unpopular among voters for the same amount of time.

During his first term, President Donald Trump sent budget after budget that would have similarly severely slashed federal spending, including deep cuts to Medicaid and nutritional assistance among other support programs. But even when the GOP controlled the House and Senate in 2017 and 2018, Congress balked at the idea of taking ownership of such draconian cuts to the federal government, even as they reduced taxes for the wealthy.

Instead, spending rose under the Republican trifecta during Trump’s first term rather than falling. As a result, even before the pandemic response, the federal deficit had grown by several trillion dollars under GOP leadership. That hesitancy to act was clearly a source of frustration among fiscal hawks who don’t really care what programs are cut if the debt and deficit go down, and the ideologues who think money spent on impoverished Americans and other liberal niceties is money wasted.

Over the last month we’ve seen what happens when Trump officials, who don’t have to run for re-election, decide to seize the reins (or chainsaw as it were) for themselves....>

<....Between Office of Management and Budget director Russel Vought and billionaire Elon Musk (or whoever is running the Department of Government Efficiency), the Trump administration has laid waste to the federal government, even as any actual savings haven’t materialized. But despite delivering on longstanding conservative rhetoric, and the tenets of Project 2025, the chaotic slash-and-burn tactics on display from Musk aren’t resonating well even among residents living in deeply conservative areas.

Upon returning to Washington on Monday, Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., said he intended to urge Musk to be “more compassionate” when firing tens of thousands of federal workers. Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wis., promised to get more answers for his constituents about the cuts and layoffs. But many more Republicans were nonchalant about the whole thing when asked, brushing off the confrontations as stunts from Democratic voters and leaning into their support for DOGE.

When the funding freeze and layoffs began, it made all the sense in the world to me that most elected Republicans would be content to sit back and watch. After all, why stop someone else who’s willing to do the dirty work after years of promising the same and opting not to deliver. If they weren’t going to act to protect the power of the purse from Trump illegally withholding funds, all they had to do if things went south was blame Musk and his associates for doing the right thing in the wrong way.

But then the budget vote went through, suddenly launching that excuse off the table. Now the cuts to Medicaid and other programs that appropriators negotiate will be subject to a vote in the coming weeks. The laid-off workers in their districts who they’ve been backchanneling to have their jobs restored may not be able to hold them for long if the funding no longer exists. It is, in effect, taking co-ownership for the hardships that millions of Americans will face with little political upside to be seen.

The backlash we’ve seen has plenty of room to grow. Media Matters reports that some conservative talk radio hosts, long used to hearing only from rabid supporters, have recently had callers more than willing to vent their frustration about how the current cuts are playing out. That number would likely increase even more once tangible impacts from potential cuts to the Social Security Administration or Department of Veterans Affairs come into play.

The question then becomes whether the GOP will be forced to confront that voter displeasure before November. NBC News reported on Wednesday that House Republicans are “becoming weary and wary of in-person town hall meetings,” with leadership suggesting “that if lawmakers feel the need to hold such events, they do tele-town halls or at least vet attendees to avoid scenes that become viral clips.”

It seems that the solution to how Republicans could finally push through their most unpopular policy plans wasn’t to foist off responsibility to unaccountable bureaucrats. It’s to become unaccountable themselves, sequestering themselves from the voters they serve so as not have to see the consequences of their actions standing before them. It’s hard for me to decide which approach is the more cowardly of the two.>

<Friends,

Here’s an op-ed by Dana Milbank, an opinion writer for The Washington Post, that ran today in the Post. I hope Milbank continues to write opinion pieces for the Post, because I’ve always found his opinions to be sharp and relevant. But given Jeff Bezos’s blatant attempt to turn the Post into a sycophantic suck-up outlet for Trump, I’m not sure.

***

Over the last 48 hours, I’ve been receiving from readers and friends the sort of notes one gets upon losing a loved one, or perhaps receiving a terminal diagnosis.

“So very sorry.”

“Hang in there.”

“Sending you love and strength.”

“With appreciation and sorrow.”

The cause of death? The belief that Post owner Jeff Bezos has just ended the tradition of open debate that has guided this paper’s editorial page for generations. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote on Wednesday morning. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

In its plain language, this is unobjectionable. Personal liberties and free markets are part of the American creed. But many readers I’ve heard from suspect the words are cover for a plan to turn this into a MAGA-friendly outlet.

I don’t yet know for sure. But this much is clear: If we as a newspaper, and we as a country, are to defend his twin pillars, then we must redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to “personal liberties and free markets” in the United States today: President Donald Trump.

The rapidly spreading authoritarianism coming from this administration threatens all of our freedoms. Trump in recent days has declared himself to be a “king.” His Self-Proclaimed Majesty announced, Louis XIV-style, that “we are the federal law.” And he proposed that “we should take over Washington, D.C.” and deny its 700,000 citizens the right of self-governance.

As for liberties, the day before the pillars announcement, the White House ended a century-old precedent and decreed that the government would handpick which news organizations would be allowed to cover and question Trump. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” protested the White House Correspondents’ Association, of which I am a member. “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.” That previously happened in repressive countries such as Russia and Iran. Now, it is happening here.

As for free markets, Trump on Thursday said he is raising tariffs on China an additional 10 percent and that his previously announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico, our largest trading partners, will go into effect on March 4, “as scheduled.” Trump this week also floated a 25 percent tariff on European goods, on top of tariffs he has already placed on steel and aluminum. This is the very antithesis of “free markets” — and the uncertainty the president is injecting into markets is poison for the economy.

Trump hasn’t managed to deport any more illegal migrants than the Biden administration had, but he has dramatically cracked down on legal immigration, undermining a sacred personal liberty. And, as The Post reports, the administration has allegedly been violating the human rights of migrants it has shipped off to Guantánamo Bay, keeping them shackled in cages, deprived of daylight, subjected to strip searches and denied access to lawyers.

At the United Nations this week, the Trump administration sided with Russia and other repressive, authoritarian states in blocking a resolution supporting democratic Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Trump falsely accused Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky of being a “dictator” as Trump continues his betrayal of Ukraine and his appeasement of the actual dictator, Vladimir Putin. Trump appears set to force Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia despite his successful extortion of mineral rights from Ukraine.

Closer to home, Trump accelerated the weaponization of federal law enforcement against his opponents, installing as the FBI’s No. 2 official a partisan podcaster who pushed 2020 election and covid-19 conspiracy theories and whose stated goal is to “own the libs,” whom he also refers to as “the scumbag commie libs.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s former general counsel — no “commie” — warned that the Trump administration “is turning federal law enforcement over to unqualified, unprincipled, partisan henchmen.”....>

<....At the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News pundit who now serves as defense secretary, purged the top ranks of generals, ousting the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (who is Black) and the Navy’s chief of operations, a woman, whom Hegseth had branded a “DEI hire.” This restored the hegemony of White men atop the military and, it is feared, leaves the military more vulnerable to Trump’s wishes to use it against domestic protesters who are exercising their personal liberties.

Judges appointed by both parties have taken a score of actions to block Trump’s executive orders and actions. And Trump has tiptoed to the edge of defying some of these court orders — while those around him suggest a purge of the judiciary. “The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” Trump’s ubiquitous sidekick, Elon Musk, posted this week. Trump has invited the world’s richest man to sabotage the federal government and to harass its workforce without any oversight by Congress and without regard to the law — an authority Musk claims is his under the “spoils of battle.”

Those spoils are apparently benefiting Musk’s own businesses. The head of Musk’s X platform allegedly threatened federal antitrust action against a company if it didn’t spend more on X, as the Wall Street Journal reports. Musk’s DOGE squad is probing payments by NASA that could impact Musk’s SpaceX business. The State Department took steps toward ordering $400 million of armored Teslas; and, as The Post reports, the Federal Aviation Administration is close to canceling a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon and instead awarding it to Musk’s Starlink.

Claiming monarchical powers, attacking the free press, starting trade wars, cutting off legal immigration, siding with despots over free countries, politicizing law enforcement and the military, assaulting the judicial system and injecting crony capitalism at the highest levels of government: These are all the very antithesis of “personal liberties and free markets.”

But don’t just take my word for it. The twin pillars of personal liberties and free markets are the hallmarks of the libertarian worldview. So I called a leading voice of that ideology, Ilya Somin, the B. Kenneth Simon chair in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute and a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. I asked him for his assessment of the current administration.

“I think, and many of us (libertarians) think, that the Trump administration is very bad on these metrics of both economic and personal liberty,” he told me. “The massive trade wars that he’s starting right and left go against Econ 101 as well as any libertarian principle. There’s the mass deportation and immigration restrictions, which restrict both economic and personal liberty on a massive scale. There’s his attacks on the freedom of the press, which are also troubling,” as is Trump’s “kissing the rear end of dictators like Vladimir Putin.”

Somin likes some of Trump’s efforts to cut regulations and taxes, but “if you look at the cumulative impact ... the horrible things Trump is doing massively outweigh many times over the good that he might do in a few areas.”

He rattled off a list of Trump’s offenses against personal liberties and free markets. The president, by circumventing Congress’s constitutional spending authority, is making the treasury “essentially the personal piggy bank of one man,” which is “extremely dangerous from the libertarian point of view.” Trump’s attempts to cut federal spending and the workforce, though laudable, “are actually pretty piddling, and some of them may even make the federal budgetary and regulatory situation worse” because of their ham-handed implementation. His takeover of independent federal agencies raises libertarian concerns because it puts massive governmental power “concentrated in the hands of one man.” His attempts to dictate school curriculums under the guise of abolishing DEI, and his discrimination against transgender people also offend libertarian principles. The GOP budget that passed the House this week with Trump’s help “will massively add to the deficit,” Somin pointed out, while doing nothing to stop the major entitlement programs, Medicare and Social Security, from “just handing out money to the nonpoor elderly or even the affluent elderly.”....>

<....Somin said the handing over of taxpayers’ personal information to unvetted members of Musk’s team violates personal liberties. Trump’s attacks on media outlets critical of him are classic “weaponization of government,” Somin added, and his packing of the Justice Department and FBI with loyalists is “scary and dangerous.” The presence of “cranks like RFK Jr.” overseeing health policy will reduce access to medicines and vaccines, which is “just a straightforward violation of libertarian principles.” And the president’s crackdown on migration is “a severe restriction on both the economic and personal liberty of native-born Americans. People who want to hire immigrants or engage in social relations with them cannot do that if those people are not allowed to enter the country.”

The professor was heavily critical of the Biden administration, too, most notably for unilaterally forgiving student loans. But “Trump is worse,” Somin said, because “under Biden there was just no equivalent to the massive assault on immigration and trade,” nor Trump’s attempt “to usurp the entire spending power from Congress.” In sum, Trump’s approach is “irreconcilable” with the principles of free markets and personal liberties.

The consequences of Trump’s illiberal actions can already be seen. Inflation has accelerated. Jobless claims jumped more than expected. Consumer confidence has slid. The stock market has been volatile. Trump’s approval numbers have inched downward.

And the backlash has begun. In scenes reminiscent of the start of the tea party movement in 2009, constituents confronted about 20 House Republicans in their districts last week over the GOP budget, which would require cuts of hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, which provides health coverage for some 40 percent of America’s children. Some Republicans have begun to speak out against the chainsaw-wielding Musk, who has been humiliating federal workers with his extralegal demand that they send him emails justifying their existences. Rep. Troy Balderson (R-Ohio) said the situation was “getting out of control” and Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Georgia), after a run-in with angry constituents, said Musk should show more “compassion.”

The anger will increase as Americans start to feel the consequences of Musk’s lawless sabotage of the federal workforce and his willy-nilly replacement of competent leaders with unqualified hacks: FEMA unable to respond to disasters; the Forest Service unable to fight fires; parks without rangers; federal prisons without guards; rising home prices; slower tax refunds; missed benefit payments; veterans unable to access medical and even burial services; the loss of the government’s counterterrorism, aviation safety and food safety functions; and federal agencies depleted of experts to fight the bird flu.

There’s a strong case for shrinking and reorganizing the federal workforce, but it can’t be done by flagrantly violating the laws and then all but ignoring the courts when they try to put a halt to the illegality. As Somin put it: “If the president manages to essentially exempt the executive branch from being subject to judicial review and judicial orders, that’s a major step towards undermining the Constitution and authoritarianism. And that’s bad from a libertarian point of view, but really, it’s just bad for any kind of liberal democracy.”

It turns out freedom and dictatorship do not mix well.

“I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America,” Bezos wrote. I am, too. And that is why we must fight to keep Trump from destroying them.>

<Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said during an interview that the “future of the free world is before us” in light of the heated White House meeting on Friday between President Trump, Vice President Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“This is no time for an apology war. There are lives at stake. There is peace at stake, and the future of really, I think it is not exaggeration to say, the future of Europe, the future of the free world, is before us,” Klobuchar said during her Friday night appearance on CNN when asked if she thought Ukraine’s president should apologize for the contentious back-and-forth, something that Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested he should.

Klobuchar, who was part of a bipartisan group of senators that met with Zelensky hours before the Oval Office huddle, argued that letting Russian President Vladimir Putin “march through Ukraine, to go at these negotiations with surrender instead of strength, is a big mistake.”

“One of the most troubling things to me was when Vice President Vance, as I noted today, as he accused President Zelensky of never thanking America,” the Minnesota senator said on CNN’s “The Source.”

“And as you just recently showed on your show, repeatedly, I have heard President Zelensky thank Republicans, thank Democrats, in private meetings, in public events, over and over,” she added.

Klobuchar was one of many Democratic lawmakers who rebuked Trump and Vance over their Friday spat with Zelensky, which appeared to have strained the relationship between Washington and Kyiv.

The bilateral meeting went awry when Vance suggested that Trump would forge a peace agreement to end the three-year war through diplomacy. Zelensky questioned the point with Putin’s actions that quashed previous ceasefires.

Vance said Zelensky was “disrespectful” for debating the premise in front of the media and that he was insufficiently grateful for the assistance that has been provided to Ukraine, adding that Kyiv’s head “should be thanking the president for trying to bring an end to his conflict.”

Zelensky said Washington has not directly felt the implications of the conflict due to its distance from Eastern Europe, a point that promoted a forceful response from Trump.

“You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards,” Trump told Ukraine’s president, emphasizing that he is “gambling with the lives of millions of people, you’re gambling with World War III … and what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, that’s backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have.”

Trump wrote after the meeting that Zelensky is not prepared for a peace agreement that would end the devastating war and that the Ukrainian president can return to Washington “when he is ready for Peace.”

Zelensky said on Fox News hours after the heated discussion in the Oval Office that he would not apologize and that the meet-up ended badly for both sides.

Klobuchar said Friday night that she has spoken to Republican senators who are interested in working on repairing the relationship between Kyiv and Washington.

“All President Zelensky was saying is that we need to make sure that the agreement is firm, or Vladimir Putin, as he has in the past, will violate it,” the Minnesota Democrat said.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, the majority of European leaders stood behind Zelensky after he met with Trump.

The Minnesota senator said three things will be important for fixing the relations between Ukraine and the U.S. The first would be signing the minerals agreement, which was supposed to be done on Friday but was canceled after the fallout.

Second, it would be standing strong with Washington’s allies, and the final component to get it “back on track” is to “just remember what is at stake here for American leadership across the world, and everything is on the table.”

“I think we should be, in America, moving forward with our allies, and I would hope that tomorrow, that we can start resetting this again instead of dividing everyone,” she said on CNN.>

<[Event "16th World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1988.07.??"]
[EventDate "1988"]
[Round "?"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Kaplan, Julio"]
[Black "Ash, Robert"]
[ECO "C82"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]