RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5302937-doge-musk-spending-reforms-fail/

Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget, told Fox News’s Martha McCallum recently that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is “not going away” and that “this incredible initiative is moving forward.”

Hopefully that is true, despite DOGE chief Elon Musk heading out the doorto save Tesla, now under attack by left-wing loons. On X Wednesday, DOGE claimed, “Current year non-defense federal obligations are down 20.5% as compared to 2024. Cash outlays will follow as obligations come due. Persistent government wide contract reviews … are bearing fruit.” An indicated $16 billion saving is encouraging.

But Republicans have published their version of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill and there’s no evidence of the spending cuts that the DOGE team promised. Instead, GOP legislators in the House are relying on controversial Medicaid reforms to make their tax cuts possible. What went wrong?

The truth is that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who volunteered to head the DOGE effort, undoubtedly overpromised. But he was also undermined by the political establishment.

At one point Musk projected his team could cut spending by up to $2 trillion. With a federal budget of $7.3 trillion, that was clearly a reach. He slimmed down his projections several times, announcing a new goal of $150 billion at an April Cabinet meeting. Musk is doubtless disappointed, as should be anyone who cares about our country’s fiscal prospects.

The DOGE chief has been thwarted at every turn by judges, claiming he was violating peoples’ privacy as his team sought to review data on Social Security, the Department of Education, the Treasury and the Office of Personnel Management. The White House’s attempts to fire federal employees were also blocked recently in court.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/05/17/if-woke-is-dead-what-comes-next/

The other day, The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham in England, proclaiming the death of woke and the end of the Progressive Era. This is more than a “vibe-shift,” Kaufmann writes; it’s “the end of the 60-year rise of left-liberalism in American culture.” He continues, arguing that the backlash against the left’s aggressive embrace of identity politics and its imposition of that politics on every aspect of our lives is far more profound and widespread than the 1990s reaction to “political correctness” and has even seeped into the left’s own organs of cultural transmission, including the mainstream media. This, in turn, has created a crisis of confidence among cultural liberals, leaving them disorganized, despondent, and marking the end of “the age of progressive confidence.”

On the one hand, I think Kaufmann is unequivocally right about all of this. I have written about the death of woke and the end of this current era of leftism myself, and I believe that Kaufmann has identified the causes and indications of the cultural left’s collapse quite nicely and succinctly.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that the death of woke will necessarily be the panacea some might hope. As even Professor Kaufmann concedes, “What replaces progressivism as our cultural lodestar will become evident only in the fullness of time.” Unfortunately, if past is prologue, “progressivism’s” replacement may well be even worse.

If one looks at the totality of the history of the left—from its bloody birth in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution to the present—then neither the death of woke nor my apprehension about the future should come as much of a surprise. Since the beginning, the left has progressed through a series of conceptual epochs, each lasting a handful of decades, following similar patterns: intellectual inception followed by slow but sure growth, resulting, eventually, in cultural domination, and then a swift demise related to its inability to deliver upon the millenarian promises it made.

https://jonathanturley.org/2025/05/15/a-modest-request-the-supreme-court-hears-challenge-to-national-or-universal-injunctions/

Today, the United States Supreme Court will hear three consolidated cases in Trump v. CASA on the growing use of national or universal injunctions. This is a matter submitted on the “shadow docket” and the underlying cases concern the controversy over “birthright citizenship.” However, the merits of those claims are not at issue. Instead, the Trump Administration has made a “modest request” for the Court to limit the scope of lower-court injunctions to their immediate districts and parties, challenging the right of such courts to bind an Administration across the nation.

The case is the consolidation of three matters: Trump v. CASA out of  Maryland; Trump v. Washington out of Washington State, and Trump v. New Jersey, out of Massachusetts. These cases also present standing issues since the Administration challenges the argument that there is a cognizable “injury” to individuals who may travel to the states bringing the actions.

However, the main question is the scope of injunctions.

As I have previously written, district court judges have issued a record number of injunctions in the first 100 days of the Trump Administration. Under President George W. Bush, there were only six such injunctions, which increased to 12 under Obama. However, when Trump came to office, he faced 64 such orders in his first term.

When Biden and the Democrats returned to office, it fell back to 14. That was not due to more modest measures. Biden did precisely what Trump did in seeking to negate virtually all of his predecessors’ orders and then seek sweeping new legal reforms. He was repeatedly found to have violated the Constitution, but there was no torrent of preliminary injunctions at the start of his term.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/every-federal-judge-should-not-have-more-power-than-the-president/

Federal district court judges issuing nationwide injunctions are a constitutional abomination that allows the opposing party to ‘judge shop’ and empowers federal judges to overrule the president not just in local cases, but on a national level, forcing the president to run to the Supreme Court for relief.

That is not remotely the system that the Framers had in mind.

The idea of the Supreme Court overruling the president was controversial back then when applied not just to an individual case but to setting a national precedent, but the idea of a D.C. judge being able to issue a nationwide injunction was inconceivable.

The second term of the Trump administration showed us what happens when a massive activist leftist lawfare campaign coordinates with federal judges to effectively function as a shadow government.

And that means the country is no longer run by a government of elected officials with some appointed officials wielding limited powers, but that it’s the elected officials who have very limited powers, while the appointed officials, whether federal judges or bureaucrats, have virtually unlimited powers.

America ceases to be a government of the people and becomes a government of the judges, by the judges and for the judges.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21625/trump-golden-era-america

The first 115 days of the Trump Administration have been filled more remedial action than we have seen from most presidents in their entire terms.

Invariably, the forecasters focus on the next 12 short months while failing to appreciate the sweep of history that has brought us to this next chapter of American history. The pessimistic “bears” among us have warned that there are systematic threats to our economy, our nation, and the stability of the world. The optimistic “bulls” will tout the enormous advances in reducing the former administration’s inflation and out-of-control illegal border crossings, the brimming new technology, foreign investments in the trillions that will bring many new jobs, Wall Street confidence, and a resilient American economy that continues to set the pace for the rest of the world.

In truth, they are both right, and the reality of America in the first half of 2025 is far more nuanced than any one side would have you believe.

With an appreciation of history, one needs to look at our nation as a democracy that has demonstrated time and time again an enormous resiliency to profound changes that would have fractured any other country — and that has been so literally since our independence.

As president, George Washington had to send troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion when a band of angry citizens of a new United States violently protested a tax on alcohol levied to pay off Revolutionary War debts. Without a strong response, America could have disintegrated at the start.

Economic cycles of boom and bust could have dismantled our democracy. Few Americans recognize how close our nation came to the political edge during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when massive unemployment led to despair among millions.

World War II propelled America into its role of a global superpower, which it continues to hold today. The war’s legacy created a pathway for civil rights, the emergence of the middle class, an interstate highway system that connected us to all points of the compass, and a strong and resilient government that avoided nuclear war through strength, leading to our ultimate victory in the Cold War.