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**FEBRUARY 14, 2025**
On the Prospect website
Donald Trump's Thursday Afternoon Massacre
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The president's handpicked prosecutors balked at an openly corrupt legal bailout for New York City Mayor Eric Adams. BY RYAN COOPER & DAVID DAYEN
Trump's DEI Purge Sweeps Up Race-Neutral Environmental Justice Program [link removed]
The administration's indiscriminate attacks on so-called 'DEI' will also harm his own base. BY HASSAN ALI KANU
The DOGE Czar's Plan to Loot Medicare [link removed]
Elon Musk's coup plotters cut their teeth at an obscure Obamacare agency that burned $10 billion testing bogus cost savings initiatives. BY MAUREEN TKACIK
Yes, the Price of Eggs Matters
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Consumer sentiment is falling off a cliff in the early Trump period. BY DAVID DAYEN
Kuttner on TAP
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**** The Queensberry Dilemma
Should liberals and federal judges take the high road against Trump and get pummeled?
The Marquis of Queensberry Rules [link removed] were devised in 1867 to define sportsmanlike conduct in the boxing ring. Honorable pugilists follow them to this day.
Donald Trump does not. He fights more like a common thug, with no holds barred and the occasional blackjack.
Unfortunately, many liberals, thinking that this is still a normal democracy, or wanting to set a good example, or just plain fearful and hoping to appease the dictator, follow the high-minded Marquis. After
Kamala Harris's defeat, President Biden worked hard to ensure a "normal" presidential transition to Trump-which this never could be.
You are kind of damned either way. Get down into the slime pit with Trump-or play fair and get hit below the belt.
I was thinking of what we might call the Queensberry Dilemma when I read of a couple of recent court decisions.
On February 8, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Engelmayer, in response to a suit by 19 state attorneys general, temporarily enjoined Elon Musk and his henchmen from accessing sensitive Treasury Department systems [link removed]. But on February 11, another federal district judge, Jeannette A. Vargas, modified Judge Engelmayer's order to provide that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other high-level Treasury colleagues could have full access
[link removed].
She wrote that the earlier order "did not suggest that Secretary Scott Bessent and other senior Treasury officials 'posed a threat of disclosure of sensitive and confidential information, or that their access would result in systems that would be more vulnerable to hacking.'"
Perish the thought that Bessent and Musk might be in cahoots. The credulous, deferential Judge Vargas is a Biden appointee.
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In an even more dubious decision, on Wednesday, District Court Judge George O'Toole Jr. allowed Trump to proceed with his proposed "deferred resignation" program [link removed], encouraging federal employees to leave their jobs
in exchange for several months of severance. On February 6, O'Toole had issued a temporary restraining order [link removed] in response to a suit by several governent employee unions, pending oral argunents.
After hearing arguments from the Trump Justice Department, O'Toole allowed the buyout to go forward. Astonishingly, the judge's rationale was that the unions lack standing to bring the suit [link removed]. If unions representing affected workers don't have standing, who does?
Beyond the technical question of standing, the entire buyout program was invented out of whole cloth. It's not at all clear whether the government even has the legal authority to make good on the promised deferred severance payments. The workers could take early retirement in good
faith, and then get stiffed-a well-known Trump technique.
Judge O'Toole is a Clinton appointee.
Robert Frost once defined a liberal as the fellow who is so high-minded that he won't take his own side in an argument. If even Democrat-appointed judges are going to look for ways to split hairs to seem ultra-fair and balanced, in the face of a wholesale assault on the Constitution, American democracy is toast.
MOST JUDGES, THANKFULLY, have not fallen into this trap. On Thursday, Judge Amir Ali, one of the last Biden appointees, issued a very forceful ruling ordering the Trump administration to restore funding for all USAID contractors [link removed].
"Defendants have not offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shock wave and upended reliance interests for thousands of agreements with
businesses, nonprofits, and organizations around the country, was a rational precursor to reviewing programs," Ali wrote.
"Absent temporary injunctive relief, therefore, the scale of the enormous harm that has already occurred will almost certainly increase," he added. Ali barred Trump officials from implementing any contract cancellations or stop-work orders while further litigation plays out.
So far, though there have been threats, the administration has followed most court orders, though some grants are still being illegally withheld. Even Trump has stopped short of saying that he would defy the courts. The major cases will end up at the Supreme Court.
There, one ray of hope is the year-end report by Chief Justice John Roberts [link removed], warning explicitly against threats to ignore court orders as a fundamental attack on the judiciary. After recounting the
sordid history of defiance of court orders, such as the white South's "massive resistance" to desegregation orders and personal threats against judges, Roberts added, "The final threat to judicial independence is defiance of judgments lawfully entered by courts of competent jurisdiction" by other branches of government. He added that "judicial independence is undermined unless the other branches are firm in their responsibility to enforce the court's decrees."
There is little doubt about who his audience was. Let's see if Roberts is as good as his word. The Queensberry rules only work if both sides honor them.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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