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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Showdown incoming [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-11
We begin today with Matthias Schwartz of The New York Times reporting that a showdown between the executive and judicial branches of the government is fast approaching because of the Trump Administrations defiance of a court order authorizing the unfreezing of federal funds.
The ruling by Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court ordered administration officials to comply with what the judge called “the plain text” of an ruling he issued on Jan. 29. That order, he wrote, was “clear and unambiguous, and there are no impediments to the Defendants’ compliance.” Shortly after Monday’s ruling, Trump administration lawyers appealed the judge’s initial order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, asking the appellate court to pause Judge McConnell’s order to keep federal funds flowing while their case was being considered. The White House responded with more defiance. [...] The legal actions on Monday marked a step toward what could evolve quickly into a high-stakes showdown between the executive and judicial branches, a day after Vice President JD Vance claimed in a social media post that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
I have...nothing to say.
Well, I have a lot to say, actually, but what I have to say might get me banned. Let’s move on to a few more journalists and pundits.
Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards of ProPublica report that DOGE has slashed nearly a billion dollars in U.S. Department of Education contracts, which will severely cripple the ability of the department to maintain accurate data about the nation’s schools.
The Trump administration has terminated more than $900 million in Education Department contracts, taking away a key source of data on the quality and performance of the nation’s schools. The cuts were made at the behest of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting crew, the Department of Government Efficiency, and were disclosed on X, the social media platform Musk owns, shortly after ProPublica posed questions to U.S. Department of Education staff about the decision to decimate the agency’s research and statistics arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. A spokesperson for the department, Madi Biedermann, said that the standardized test known as the nation’s report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, would not be affected. Neither would the College Scorecard, which allows people to search for and compare information about colleges, she said. IES is one of the country’s largest funders of education research, and the slashing of contracts could mean a significant loss of public knowledge about schools. The institute maintains a massive database of education statistics and contracts with scientists and education companies to compile and make data public about schools each year, such as information about school crime and safety and high school science course completion.
Keith Bradsher of The New York Times explains why tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum are important even though China does not export much steel and aluminum to the United States.
China does not export a lot of steel or aluminum directly to the United States. A succession of presidents and Commerce Department rulings have already imposed many tariffs on steel from China. Tariffs have also gone up lately on Chinese aluminum. Just last September, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. raised existing tariffs on many Chinese steel and aluminum products by up to 25 percent. But China dominates the global steel and aluminum industry. Its vast, modern mills make as much of both metals, or more, each year as the rest of the world combined. Most of it is used within China’s borders, to build everything from high-rises and ships to washing machines and cars. Yet lately, China’s steel and aluminum exports are on the rise because its economy is struggling, sapping domestic demand. Many of these low-cost exports have gone to American allies like Canada and Mexico, which in turn export significant shares of their own more expensive output to the United States. Other Chinese metal exports have gone to developing countries like Vietnam, which now buys enormous quantities of semi-processed steel from China, finishes it and then re-exports it as Vietnamese steel to buyers around the globe. China’s rising exports have upset producers and labor unions in the United States.
Jessie Hellman and Sandhya Raman of Roll Call report that a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order lawsuit on the executive branch’s slashing of NIH funds.
District Court Judge Angel Kelley of the U.S. District of Massachusetts gave the administration until Friday to file an opposition to the motion and scheduled a hearing for Feb. 21. The lawsuit, filed Monday in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, seeks to block a change by the National Institutes of Health that would cut payments to universities, medical centers and researchers studying cancer, rare diseases and other health issues. [...] The lawsuit was filed by 22 states known for being powerhouses of biomedical research, including Massachusetts, California, Maryland and New York. Also part of the lawsuit are: Michigan, Illinois, Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
Marianna McMurdock of The 74 reports about a study showing that ~25% of the nation’s 13-18 year olds on average, spend about two hours out of a school day on their phones.
Stony Brook University’s research, published in JAMA Pediatrics, is the first to accurately paint a picture of adolescent phone behavior by using a third party app to monitor usage over four months in 2023. Previous studies have relied on parent surveys or self-reported estimates. “That’s pretty alarming … It’s too much, not only because of the missed learning opportunity in the classroom,” said researcher Lauren Hale, sleep expert and professor at Stony Brook’s Renaissance School of Medicine. “They’re missing out on real life social interaction with peers, which is just as valuable for growth during a critical period of one’s life,” she told The 74. Hale and the other researchers’ early findings come from 117 teens for which they had school data, just one slice of a pool from over 300 participants, which will be analyzed and used to consider how phone usage impacts sleep, obesity, depression and other outcomes.
Finally today, Jamie Dettmer of POLITICO Europe, report that European nations continue to contemplate a variety of strategies that can be used now that the shoe salesman is back on the scene in world politics; all this as this year’s Munich Security Conference begins this Friday.
It will be a topic much discussed by the great and good at this week’s Munich Security Conference. Should he be approached with kid gloves and talked to more in sorrow than anger? Should he be ignored and told to stand in the corner until he behaves himself while the other children play? (Though, ignoring the leader of the most powerful nation on earth is impossible.) Or is kowtowing the best strategy? So far, some have resorted to taking their cues directly from the Trump administration by getting tougher on migration or slowing down on net zero — an approach that has the added benefit of helping to fend off their own nationalist populists. However, they appear almost plastic as they do so, as if caught in a hostage video. [...] Downplaying the importance of democracy is probably wise, given Trump didn’t mention the word once in his inaugural address — in stark contrast with that of his predecessor Joe Biden, who mentioned it 11 times. The past scripts simply don’t work in Trump’s Washington anymore. They have no traction — even when it comes to international human rights and the promotion of democracy, which MAGA loyalists claim were grotesquely inflated anyway. They’ve all been fed, along with the U.S. Agency for International Development, into Elon Musk’s woodchipper.
Everyone try to have the best possible day that you can!
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