Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell called it the “Pottery Barn Rule.” You break it, you own it. President W owned Operation Iraqi Freedom because he broke it, learning too late that beating Saddam Hussein did not mean that democracy would fill the necessarily void. Trump never learned the lesson.

From the outset, Trump has been careful to declare limits around the U.S. attack, saying he wanted to overthrow the current regime, but telling Iranians it was up to them to seize the opportunity to write their country’s next chapter. His communication strategy has reinforced those limits by creating a bit of distance — at least in imagery — between the president and the fighting.

At the same time, however, Trump has adopted expansive rhetoric about the reasoning for his intervention that recalled the justifications used for earlier U.S. forays into the Middle East.

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United States Constitution

Article I, Section 8, Clause 11

The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Over the past few decades, presidents have flexed their military muscle. Some in response to acts against the United States or its allies. Some in discrete, one-shot actions like Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities that obliterated its nuclear weapons capacity or his invasion of Venezuela to seize its president and rendition him back to America. Continue reading →

It seems clear that the op-ed couldn’t be written by Pete Hegseth, as it was coherent and all the words were spelled correctly. But it came as a shock that it was written by Frank Kendall, who served as Secretary of the Air Force under President Biden. Given the current Secretary’s obsession with war and lethality, the effort to hijack a private company upon threat of its destruction by being named as a “supply chain risk,” thus making it unusable either to the government or to any enterprise doing business with the government, one would have expected, hoped?, that the response would have been a robust defense of private enterprise. But that wasn’t where Kendall went.

Anthropic is insisting that the government agree to specific restrictions that would prevent the use of its model to conduct widespread surveillance of Americans or to control autonomous weapons like drones without a human in what is called the “kill chain.” The company reiterated on Thursday that it has no intention to change its position. The government says that the only requirement its contractors can insist on is that their products be used lawfully.

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The glibberish response from the Department of Justice provides no clue as to why the summaries and 302s are nowhere to be found.

The Justice Department said in a statement to The Times on Monday that “the only materials that have been withheld were either privileged or duplicates.” In a new statement on Tuesday, the department also noted that documents could have been withheld because of “an ongoing federal investigation.” Officials did not directly address why the memos related to the woman’s claim were not released.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Justice Department said in a new statement that it was reviewing which documents were released in connection to the index. The department said it would publish any documents “found to have been improperly tagged in the review process” that are legally required to be made public.

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There are nine. There were seven seats. Four showed. Why? Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kagan, Kavanaugh and Barrett were present for the State of the Union address. As tradition dictates, they sat there stoic, hands folded in their laps, faces frozen, showing no reaction to the one hour and 47 minute speech. There was no reason for the four to be there.

Now would be a good time to put an end to the charade that the annual State of the Union address is a solemn occasion of civic ceremony. Although there have been moments in which the speech has seemed to serve such a function, it has always been primarily a vehicle of presidential and partisan boosterism.

Members of Congress and the Supreme Court have long been dragooned into playing along with the ruse. They should not continue to do so. They should stay home and let the president deliver his speech to a half-empty room of his most partisan supporters.

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There is no doubt that Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon harbors unduly kind feelings toward her patron, President Trump. Her bizarre prior rulings in the documents case, reversed by the Eleventh Circuit, leave no doubt. But that doesn’t mean she’s necessarily wrong.

A Trump-appointed federal judge on Monday permanently barred the Justice Department from releasing a report by the special counsel Jack Smith detailing President Trump’s mishandling of reams of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021.

The ruling by the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, was her latest effort in the past several months to keep the public from seeing Mr. Smith’s sprawling report — one of the most significant parts of his twin prosecutions of Mr. Trump that has yet to see the light of the day.

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There’s no reason to explain why Trump’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources v. Trump was, as Ed Whelan called it, “stupid and vile.” The left lunatic Wall Street Journal characterized his rant as “arguably the worst moment of his Presidency,” which is hard to say given how many moments vie for the title.

But as Trump’s now favorite justice explained in his dissent, there are other statutes that permit a president to impose tariffs, and Trump immediately seized upon Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 (19 U.S.C. § 2132) to impose a universal tariff of 10%, upped the next day to the maximum 15%, which can last 150 days, after which he will require congressional approval. While it’s true that § 122 is a mechanism for the imposition of ad valorem taxes, that does not mean that the statute authorized Trump to impose them at will. Continue reading →

Once upon a time, in a far off land of make believe, there were two roommates: a hippopotamus named Hoopy Doopy and a unicorn named Gumdrop.

Hoopy Doopy was from a quiet neighborhood and liked to do things most hippos enjoy: eat snacks, lay in the sun, swim and watch professional wrestling.

Gumdrop, on the other hand, was from a place he often referred to as “The Dark Side of the Tracks.” He didn’t know who his mother and father were, and often sought solace in the ministrations of a French ferret named Pierre, who regularly sold him a magical powder he swore would make Gumdrop more sociable. Continue reading →

With so many issues arising during the same week, from the unfurling of the Trump mugshot banner on the Department of Justice building to more murders on the high seas to the $10 billion in United States taxpayer funds being given without any lawful authority to the Trump vanity board, of which Trump will be chairman for life and eschewed by every democracy in the world, to repainting the fleet of airplanes in Trump’s favored palate to getting his stacked board to give final approval the enormous White House ballroom even though there are no final plans to the unauthorized war threatened against Iran to putatively stop its nuclear program that doesn’t exist because Trump already “obliterated” it, it’s understandable that this bit failed to make a banner headline on the front page.

At any other time, under any other president, it would have. And despite the plethora of daily outrages, it’s still worthy of recognition. Continue reading →

District of New Jersey Judge Michael E. Farbiarz directed the government to do something novel: Provide a list of every court order in the district since December 5th the government violated. The very notion of this would have been unimaginable, if not unappreciated, a year ago. But here we are.

In a response last week, Jordan Fox, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, filed an 11-page declaration describing 52 separate violations across 547 cases, describing them as accidental.

She wrote that detainees were transferred 17 times despite court orders prohibiting them from being moved. The moves took place “inadvertently due to logistical delays,” she wrote.

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