The executive order, like all too many, is lawless

Back in mid January I watched the movie Hugo. Part of it was an homage to early film making and the films of Georges Méliès. At the time I mentioned the Georges Méliès festival at the Detroit Film Theater at the end of March. We’re now at the end of March and the festival was last evening. It really wasn’t a “festival.” There were eleven films, but they all fit in 80 minutes. Since these were silent films, the earliest from 1898, they were accompanied by three musicians. I’m not sure if they have an independent name or were assembled to accompany these films on tour, of which Detroit was the first stop. Perhaps the name Right in the Eye is the name of the package of films and musicians. That name refers to the image of the man in the moon being hit in the eye by a rocket ship. That image was featured in Hugo. Alas, that film wasn’t included. The films shown indicate a man who understood at a very early time what cinema could do. The Lilliputians and the Giants played with scale. Fat and Lean Wrestling Match showed the director could stop filming to make a substitution in the scene – one fighter would deliver a blow which would turn the other into something flat or a dismembered manikin and a few moments later turn into a human again. The longest film was The Kingdom of Fairies where a group of people used a variety of vehicles to visit fantastical lands while pursued by bad guys. No matter how many times the vehicles crashed the occupants emerged unharmed. Since there is no sound all the actors gesticulated wildly, constantly in motion. I quite enjoyed this early look into cinema. Alas, these films probably won’t be seen on streaming. Oliver Willis of Daily Kos looked over the media responses to Signal-gate, where the top military and intelligence discussed plans on the unsecured signal app, and found media “sanewashing” it. They called it such things as a “relatable fail,” a “blunder,” and a “mishap.” They were not calling it what it was – a severe breach of national security, for which participants should lose their jobs, but probably won’t. Walter Einenkel of Kos reported the nasty guy escalated his assault on democracy by issuing an executive order that threatens to withhold federal grant money to force states to comply to voter suppression tactics already enacted in several states. It also grants DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security access to voting records. As is typical the claims given to support the order are lies. The nasty guy did not win by a landslide. The American voting system is already quite secure. And millions of undocumented immigrants are not voting.

Danielle Lang, a voting rights lawyer at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center told The Guardian that there is nothing constitutional about Trump’s order. “The short answer is that this executive order,” she said, “like all too many that we’ve seen before, is lawless and asserts all sorts of executive authority that he most assuredly does not have.”

My friend and debate partner tells me his Social Security check is still coming. That’s reassuring. But it’s likely still coming because he’s already in the system – at least for a while. Emily Singer of Kos titled her report “It only took two months for Trump and Musk to break Social Security.” The workforce has been cut, field offices closed, and rules for verifying one’s identity have changed. The website has crashed four times in ten days because servers were overloaded. The agency’s ability to serve the public has diminished, but one can’t complain because the office to monitor customer experience is gone. The rule changes mean identity verification can’t be done over the phone. One can do it online (and I started tangling with the verification system and gave up, to tackle when I have lots of time) or in person. Many seniors don’t use computers or live in rural areas without good internet. One has to find an open office and it now may be a good distance away. Then make an appointment with a lot more people having to do the same and a lot fewer agents able to help them. And one must get there – not always easy for seniors. My friend is likely fine. But my eventual application process may be much more difficult than his was. Singer says breaking Social Security is “politically moronic.” It is quite popular, has broad public support, and is critical to highly reliable voting block. Older voters are already packing Republican town halls demanding they stand up to DOGE. In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jonathan Weiler who writes Jonathan’s Quality Kvetching Newsletter:

The point is to remind ourselves and the political leaders who seek to represent us that their approach to endless rightwing fulminating needs to change fundamentally. It's both bad politics and unprincipled to cave in to blatant bad faith out of some misguided notion of decorum, or fear of losing popular support, or because maybe Republicans have a point about some tempest in a teapot (Hunter Biden’s laptop, anyone?) when, in this era, Republicans’ only goal is to seize power and then abuse it once they have it. Democrats have limited tools at their disposal right now, as we all know. But they need to start practicing, both for the sake of the party’s future, and the country’s, a different mode of politics. As Josh Marshall wrote yesterday, one thing they can do is adopt a parliamentary opposition’s approach. In parliamentary systems, the opposition has a shadow cabinet. One purpose of that is to provide the public with an ongoing narrative about what the government is doing wrong and how the opposition would act differently if and when they return to power. The point of this exercise isn’t to lie about your opponents. It’s in part to ensure that the public doesn’t only hear one side of the political story.

Dworkin quoted a tweet by Orla Joelsen. I went to it directly to see the whole thing.

Representatives of the American government have been going door to door in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, in recent days ahead of the now-canceled visit by the U.S. Second Lady, Usha Vance. This is according to TV 2’s correspondent in Nuuk, Jesper Steinmetz.

American representatives have been walking around, practically knocking on one door after another in the past few days to ask if people might be interested in a visit from the Vice President’s wife. Everywhere, the answer was the same: ‘No, thanks.’