Volcanoes are erupting in The Philippines, but on-fire Australia received some welcome rain. The Iran war cries have been called off and The Donald’s military powers are about to be hamstrung by the Senate. Meanwhile, his impeachment trial is starting, and we’re all on Twitter for a front-row seat.
What Could Go Right? Take It to Court
Trump’s maneuvers to test the limits of his power are being met with immediate legal challenges.
This is our weekly newsletter, What Could Go Right? Sign up here to receive it in your inbox every Thursday at 5am ET. You can read past issues here.
Take It to Court
At first blush, the Trump administration’s strategy to quell resistance through sheer overwhelm seems to be working. (Yes, the all-at-once avalanche of executive orders was a strategy, two advisors of President Trump told The Atlantic.) Until the debacle over pausing federal aid funding this week, pushback from the political arena has been muted, and there have been no protests near the scale of the ones that occurred when Trump was first elected in 2016.
The courts are another matter. A blitz of lawsuits have trailed Trump’s executive orders and other actions taken by his administration. In some instances, judges have already issued checks against them.
Any president will make changes that people will not agree with, but some of Trump’s maneuvers are legally questionable, and represent a coordinated power grab for the executive branch. Today, I want to highlight the swift response to bring those under judicial review.
Federal Aid Freeze:
On Monday, the Trump administration sought to pause all federal aid programs until they could be vetted for “DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.” The freeze would take effect the following day and apply to anything from SNAP benefits to homeless shelters.
Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal services organization founded in the wake of the 2016 election, immediately filed a lawsuit. On Tuesday, the judge issued a stay against the directive, giving the organization and the government until Monday, February 3, to prepare arguments for court.
Facing that case and a second, pending one from 22 states’ attorneys general, yesterday the administration rescinded the memo that had ordered the freeze but stressed that funding would still face an internal review.
The chaos and uncertainty this directive has unleashed aside, why is this a legal problem? Since 1974, the president has not had the power to withhold or delay funds Congress has already decided how to spend. The lawsuit filed by Democracy Forward, however, was to be argued on different legal grounds, one of them the right of the American people to be “free from arbitrary and capricious government,” Democracy Forward’s CEO, Skye Perryman, told reporter Jessica Yellin in an excellent interview.
Some commentators believe that the administration’s reversal on the issue, however, had less to do with the court cases and more to do with outrage from state and local officials who were relying on federal funds for various projects and were caught off guard by the announcement.
Eliminating Birthright Citizenship:
Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s executive order that would eliminate birthright citizenship, a right ensured since the passage of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1866. A hearing on February 6 will determine whether the order will be blocked “long term as the case proceeds,” reports the Associated Press.
United States District Judge John Coughenour, who is presiding over the case, was unsympathetic to Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, telling a Justice Department attorney that “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”
Four other lawsuits have also been filed against the order and are awaiting a hearing.
“The president has no authority to change the [birthright] citizenship rule at all,” Harvard Law School professor Gerald Neuman told Harvard Law Today, and Congress only has the ability to make the rule broader. “Neither Congress nor the president can reduce it below the constitutional minimum,” he continued.
The lawsuits, filed by a group of 22 Democratic states’ attorneys general, are ones that have been in the making for years. “We saw this coming,” former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, who is working with the group, told The 19th.
Other Legal Challenges:
Two lawsuits have also been filed over Trump’s “Schedule F” order, which removes civil service protections from tens of thousands of government employees and reclassifies them as political hires. (In other words, it makes them fireable on political grounds.)
Perryman, the CEO of Democracy Forward, also noted in her interview with Yellin that she expects announcements of lawsuits over Trump’s firing of 18 inspectors general, which monitor the government for waste, fraud, and abuse, to be coming soon. Former Attorney General Rosenblum, too, noted to The 19th that she expects “more actions being brought by attorneys general within the next few days, certainly weeks.”
Speaking about the federal court system overall, Perryman also sounded a reassuring note for those worried about a pro-Trump lean in the courts, noting that there are “more pro-democracy, more pro-rule of law judges today than . . . on the last day of the last Trump administration.”
And here, Vox examines reasons to believe that if any future cases end up in front of the Supreme Court, they would still curb the most outlandish ones, though of course there is no guarantee.
By the Numbers
68.5%: The female completion rate for primary school in sub-Saharan Africa, up from 48.5% in 2000 and nearing the completion rate for boys (71.3%).
139: The current number of non-white US Congressmembers, a near-doubling since 2005.
22%: The decline in drug overdose deaths in the US between August 2023 and 2024, the largest drop ever recorded in a 12-month period.
45: The number of countries—plus one territory—that are malaria-free, now that Georgia has been certified by the World Health Organization.
Quick Hits
🐝 Officials have declared that the world’s largest hornet, dubbed the “murder hornet” for its killer stings, has been eradicated in the US five years after it was first spotted.
🧫 New scientific techniques are raising the possibility that in vitro maturation (IVM) could become a viable alternative to IVF, which entails an arduous process and uncomfortable side effects for women to become pregnant. (The Atlantic $)
💰 Mexico is beginning a national buy-back program for guns; gun owners can drop off revolvers, AK-47s, and machine guns anonymously at predetermined locations and receive up to $1,300. The guns are then destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of guns are smuggled into Mexico from the US every year.
👩🍼 A Spanish court has ruled that a single mother is entitled to the same amount of parental leave as a couple would be entitled to—32 weeks—”on the grounds that all babies should be treated the same, regardless of the composition of their families.”
🔋 About 84 percent of the Inflation Reduction Act funds earmarked for clean energy projects will not be able to be rescinded by the Trump administration. On a related note, the former leader of the Office of Gun Violence Prevention under the Biden administration anticipates future progress, even after the changeover.
🤖 Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing “robot insects.” Weighing less than a paper clip and integral to a vision of entirely indoor farming, the tiny fliers are improving but still can’t compete with real bees.
💉 Most vaccines and drugs must be kept cold to work. A research team has discovered, however, that an oil-based solution could also do the trick of keeping these life-saving medicines stable, opening the door to cheaper supply chains and increased access.
🧠 A nasal spray that uses a drug related to ketamine has been approved for use by itself to treat treatment-resistant depression (it was previously only allowed in concert with another antidepressant). Unlike traditional antidepressants, the spray works to relieve symptoms of depression as quickly as the next day.
👀 What we’re watching: It’s a slow roll with many caveats, but the age of teens having unfettered access to pornography on the Internet appears to be meeting its end in the US, due to legislation and an anticipated Supreme Court decision. (The Atlantic $)
💡 Editor’s pick: Is the impact of President Trump withdrawing from the Paris climate accords mostly symbolic?
TPN Member Originals
(Who are our Members? Get to know them.)
- The impact of Trump 2.0 on the US economy | GZERO | Ian Bremmer
- America for sale | No Mercy/No Malice | Scott Galloway
- Trump’s ‘America First’ goal imperils the better world America built | WaPo ($) | Fareed Zakaria
- How Trump will fail | NYT ($) | David Brooks
- Trump is going woke | NYT ($) | Thomas L. Friedman
- Autocrats want to traumatize us, but we know their playbook and we know our value | Lucid | Ruth Ben-Ghiat
- The case for vaccinating chickens | Slow Boring | Matthew Yglesias
- Maximum pressure or maximum chaos for the Middle East? | The International Correspondent | Faisal Saeed Al Mutar
Zachary Karabell on his work and why he continues to be an “edgy optimist” | The Optimism Institute | Zachary Karabell
- How my struggle with Wittgenstein can make you happier | The Atlantic ($) | Arthur C. Brooks
Journalist Nicole Kobie on why the future of tech still hasn’t arrived | Faster, Please! | James Pethokoukis