SolutionsWatch, 02/04/25
Source: The Corbett Report
“How to REALLY Resist Digital ID.” (02/04/25)
Can Trump refuse to spend money Congress allocates?
Source: Palm Beach Post
by Kevin Wagner
“The ability to draw and send money, or the power of the purse, belongs to Congress. The Constitution states in Article I, Section 9, Clause 7 that ‘No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.’ While the President has the duty to enforce and carry out the laws, Congress writes and enacts them. The Supreme Court has consistently affirmed Congress’s authority over federal spending, reaffirming that no money can be spent without an appropriation from Congress (1850) and that executive actions cannot create financial obligations beyond what Congress has authorized (1990). … Nonetheless, there have been regular conflicts between legislative and executive branches over spending, or not spending.” (02/04/25)
Trump’s tariff battles: A bump in the road, or making a mess of everything?
Source: Fox News
by Liz Peek
“Even God took the seventh day off. Not Donald Trump. The blitz of new programs and initiatives emanating from the White House in just two weeks is unprecedented and encouraging. There are so many things that are broken in our country; President Trump seems determined to tackle them all. (It makes you wonder just what Joe Biden and his hapless crew were up to for the past four years.) As of today, President Trump has been in the Oval Office for just over two weeks; in that time he has pushed through much-needed reforms of the Washington bureaucracy, fired a slew of people responsible for weaponizing the Department of Justice, banned DEI programs and ‘gender-affirming care,’ tossed much of the Green New Deal out the window, persuaded Panama to drop their participation in China’s Belt & Road project, enabled the deportation of heinous criminals and brought home hostages from Venezuela.” (02/04/25)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/liz-peek-trumps-tariff-battles-just-bump-road-make-mess-everything
The Trump Executive Orders as “Radical Constitutionalism”
Source: Executive Functions
by Bob Bauer & Jack Goldsmith
“Why do so many of President Trump’s multitudinous executive orders fly in the face of extant legal principles? Are they the result of incompetence? Is the administration laying the groundwork for test cases in an effort to expand executive power in the Supreme Court? Below we assess a third possibility: the administration doesn’t care about compliance with current law, might not care about what the Supreme Court thinks either, and is seeking to effectuate radical constitutional change. The third possibility sounds histrionic, which is not our usual posture. But it appears to be the view of Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, who is one of Trump’s ‘most influential advisers,’ who will be voted on for confirmation in the Senate soon, and who will play a central role in Trump’s executive orders, if he hasn’t already.” [hat tip — Damon Linker] (02/04/25)
https://executivefunctions.substack.com/p/the-trump-executive-orders-as-radical
FBI Agents Association appeals to Congress to protect their jobs
Source: Orange County Register
“The association representing thousands of FBI agents urged congressional leaders Monday to protect the jobs of employees at risk of punishment or possibly termination over their participation in investigations into the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The letter from the FBI Agents Association, which represents the interests of more than 14,000 current and retired agents, follows the revelation that thousands of employees were asked over the weekend to complete a detailed questionnaire about their involvement in Jan. 6 investigations. Separately Monday, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to Trump’s picks to run the FBI and Justice Department — Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, respectively — to express ‘grave concerns’ about the efforts to scrutinize, reassign and remove career officials and to demand a raft of internal communications about their plans to shake up the agencies.” (02/03/25)
Agorist Nexus Podcast, episode 160
Source: Agorist Nexus
“Beekeeping and building toward self-sustainability with Natural Born Alchemist.” (02/04/25)
Removing the Ivy-Tinted Glasses
Source: Law & Liberty
by Andy Smarick
“Many Americans are frustrated by elite private universities. We’ve seen their hostility to diversity of opinion and free speech, politically imbalanced faculty and administrators, galling instances of antisemitism, enormous costs, unfair admissions processes, and more. For such reasons, public approval of higher education had been low and falling for some time, particularly on America’s right. And that was before the campus unrest of 2024, which was concentrated at the most affluent private schools. As a result, a growing number of hiring managers claim to be looking elsewhere.” (02/04/25)
Dramatic drop in monarch butterfly count nears record 30-year low
Source: SFGate
“The number of monarch butterflies spending the winter in the western United States has dropped to its second-lowest mark in nearly three decades as pesticides, diminishing habitat and climate change take their toll on the beloved pollinator. Monarch butterflies, known for their distinctive orange-and-black wings, are found across North America. Monarchs in the eastern United States spend their winters in Mexico and are counted by the World Wildlife Fund, which has yet to release data for this year. Monarchs west of the Rocky Mountains typically overwinter along the California coast. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation has been counting western overwinter populations along the California coast, northern Baja California and inland sites in California and Arizona for the last 28 years. The highest number recorded was 1.2 million in 1997. The organization announced Friday that it counted just 9,119 monarchs in 2024, a decrease of 96% from 233,394 in 2023.” (02/04/25)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/dramatic-drop-in-monarch-butterfly-count-nears-20144843.php
What Does National Security Have To Do With Soaring Defense Spending?
Source: Antiwar.com
by Casey Carlisle
“Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, the natural progress of things is for prices to yield and for quality to gain ground. Technology is what enables this natural progress. Do televisions cost more now than they did in the early ‘90s? What about mobile phones? Same answer for both questions: both are better and less expensive today than they were in the early ‘90s, which is why one will conclude that something is awry when reading headlines like ‘Global Military Spending Has Almost Doubled Since the Early ‘90s.’ Why has military spending almost doubled since the early ‘90s? Arguably for the same reason hospital services have: government intervention. Those who ‘serve’ in government endlessly tax the present because they arrogantly claim to know what the future should be rather than allow the future to unfold via voluntary exchange between producers and consumers.” (02/04/25)
Nothing Normal About This CFPB Takeover
Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“On Saturday, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Rohit Chopra, who for two weeks had been hanging on as head of the agency despite clear Supreme Court guidance that directors served at the pleasure of the president, was fired. By Monday, President Trump had named a replacement: Scott Bessent, the current Treasury Secretary. Bessent immediately froze all rulemaking, litigation, guidance, enforcement actions, and even public communications upon taking the role, in order to ‘promote consistency with the goals of the Administration.’ Other than activities that have to move forward by law, the agency is pretty much shut down, pending a review with no defined timeline. In the grand scheme of unlawful actions taken over the past few days, this development trends a little closer to whatever you might call normal these days.” (02/04/25)
https://prospect.org/economy/2025-02-04-nothing-normal-about-this-cfpb-takeover/