#executive-branch-erosion

#executive-branch-erosion

The proposal is the North Carolina GOP's latest attack on the state bar, a government agency that regulates lawyers. If this proposal becomes law, the same Republicans who have targeted Democratic justices with bogus ethics charges will control the committee that decides when lawyers violate ethics rules.

The cycle of dread and panic, of being driven to the edge at full speed before someone slams the brakes, harms our nervous systems, and has the potential to break our spirits.

Forecasters now predict that the coming El Niño—a warming of the Pacific Ocean that deeply affects global weather patterns—is likely to be as severe as the one in 2023-2024, which triggered severe flooding and prolonged heatwaves around the world.

A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo.

Gonzales has been in hot water on Capitol Hill for a while, after repeatedly denying and then admitting he was lying about an affair with a married staffer who later committed suicide in exceedingly grisly and tragic fashion.

The real Führer is always a judge. Out of Führerdom flows judgeship. One who wants to separate the two from each other or puts them in opposition to each other would have the judge be either the leader of the opposition or the tool of the opposition and is trying to unhinge the state with the help of the judiciary.

The Justice Department's acceptance of the court's appointment of Robert Frazer as head of New Jersey's U.S. attorney's office marks a significant shift in its stance on judicial authority. This decision ended an eight-month standoff that left New Jersey without a lawfully serving U.S. attorney, creating a leadership vacuum that jeopardized numerous criminal indictments.

As the United States heads toward the midterm elections, there are growing concerns among some political scientists that the country has moved even further along the path to some form of autocracy. Staffan I. Lindberg, the director of Sweden's V-Dem Institute, which monitors democracy across the globe, says the U.S. has already crossed the threshold and become an "electoral autocracy."

It turns out: not that many world leaders or global citizens. That's because the Board of Peace, created last year by a UN security council resolution, and intended to have a singular focus on implementing a Gaza peace plan, is increasingly looking like a Donald Trump fiefdom, which could allow the US president to wade into other countries' affairs as he sees fit.

From the moment Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term, he made clear that a major priority of his administration would be pursuing vindictive actions against his perceived enemies. One of the earliest targets of this agenda of retribution: law firms. In his first months in office, Trump signed executive orders that targeted firms that supported DEI, represented the Democratic Party, advocated for liberal causes, or employed prosecutors who had worked on former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump's 2016 campaign.

This script is based on a theory proposed by Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale Law School. Ackerman's idea is laid out in his 1991 book We The People: Foundations, and is discussed in the second of his Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures of 2006. It's gained prominence since the 2024 election and the wholesale assault on our governmental system by Trump.

When a president says his authority is limited only by his own morality, the Constitution has already been violated. The oath of office binds the president to law, not conscience, not instinct, not personal judgment. Claiming otherwise is a declaration that constitutional limits are optional. This is not rhetoric. It is an imminent danger. A president who believes only he restrains himself is asserting personal sovereignty. That is the definition of autocracy.

During an appearance on former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino's podcast, Trump recycled some of his baseless elections claims saying he won states that were actually won by President Joe Biden in 2020 or Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, for example to argue that Republicans needed to be tougher on election fraud. The Republicans should say, We want to take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places,' said Trump. The Republicans oughta nationalize the voting.