Pun Salad

Jim Geraghty makes a powerful case for today's Amazon Bumper Sticker du Jour: Why the Ukraine Cease-Fire Is No Cause for Celebration. With an impressive, and depressive, long list of recent events:

A long excerpt, sorry. But, forgive me Saint Elvis, I am disgusted. And we could have had Nikki Haley.

I'll only add that if Russia had conceded something … anything … it would be naive to think it would actually keep that commitment. As Jim notes, Russia, and especially Putin, have a track record of promises violently broken.

Also of note:

• I'm pretty sure it's "loyalty" that's the last refuge of a scoundrel. Kevin D. Williamson has thoughts on The Souls of Serfs and Subjects .

  Loyalty is a two-edged sword, because the virtue is necessarily conditional: Loyalty to whom or to what? To what degree? To the exclusion of which other virtues? St. Peter, after getting off to a rough start (three times!) was a loyalist to the end—but, then, so was Eva Braun.

  Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined with the chief justice to rule against Trump in the matter of his attempt to unilaterally freeze certain federal spending, is a great loyalist—but not the kind of loyalist Donald Trump’s ghastly little sycophants demand that she be. Justice Barrett is loyal to her oath of office, to the law, to the Constitution, to certain principles governing her view of the judge’s role in American life—all of which amounts to approximately squat in the Trumpist mind, which demands only—exclusively—that she be loyal to Trump, and that she practice that loyalty by giving him what he wants in court, the statute books—and the Constitution—be damned.

  The usual dopes demand that she give Trump what he wants because he is “the man who put her on the Supreme Court.” Mike Davis of the Article III Project (not the author of Late Victorian Holocausts; his organization works to recruit Trump-friendly judges) sneers that the justice is “weak and timid” and, because he is a right-wing public intellectual in 2025, that “she is a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.” Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch, presumably is not as titanically stupid as he sounds, but there is a reason Justice Barrett is on the Supreme Court and he is a right-wing media gadfly who describes his job as “punching back at the left’s attacks.”

  KDW is not reluctant to call a spade a spade, and a dope a dope.

• The ass-biting will commence sooner than Mike thinks. That's House Speaker Mike Johnson, guest columnist at Jeff Maurer's substack, who writes: Haha, Right: As If Giving the President Near-Limitless Power Over Spending Would Ever Come Back to Bite Republicans in the Ass.

  Of all the ways that Trump is reshaping the government, surely the most consequential is shifting the power of the purse to the executive branch. DOGE is cancelling spending approved by Congress. Trump’s lawyers are in court asserting broad power over spending. The White House has expanded the concept of an “unusual or extraordinary threat” to take total control of tariff policy, even though Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives that power to Congress.

  The Republican Congress — led by me — has accepted and even cheered this shift in authority. We’ve championed it as a necessary measure to rein in spending. And already, two things are clear:

  1. We’ve handed the president a powerful tool to dictate this country’s finances;

  2. There is no way that tool could ever be used in the future to make Republicans deeply regret our actions.

  Both points are indisputable, right? I mean: We have basically forfeited spending to the executive branch — even the budget resolution that Congress is working on right now is functionally a suggestion that the president can take or leave. That is indisputably a lot of power. And equally indisputable, I think, is the notion that there is no way that power could ever, in any conceivable universe, be wielded against Republican interests. There’s just no chance. We will never find ourselves saying “Oh no, we opened Pandora’s box.” Never. Unimaginable. An absurd and ridiculous fantasy.

  See if you can spot the flaws in Mike's logic!

• Also: does he really care? Charles C. W. Cooke wonders Does Trump Know Why He Was Elected?

  President Trump is at risk of blowing his second term before it has hit the two-month mark.

  Go on. Shout at me for saying that. I don’t care. Who does? Outside of a handful of terminally online zealots who do more harm than good to their side, nobody is invested in today’s presidential side quests. Early on in his tenure, Joe Biden forgot the lesson that had made him president: that neither social media nor the activists who dominate it are representative of real life. Astonishingly, Donald Trump is on the verge of making the same mistake. Within a year of his victory, Biden had lost sight of why he’d won, inoculated himself against feedback, become insular in his political outlook, and, worst of all, given in to the temptation to prioritize his pet projects over the elementary building blocks atop which all successful administrations are built. By advancing his chaotic, capricious, contradictory tariff agenda, Trump is making a similar mistake. Absent a genuine crisis, such as a world war or stagflation, it is invariably smart for presidents to begin with the quick wins, gain the trust and support of the public by yielding stability, and only then turn to the unpopular or tricky parts of their brief. Trump, like Biden, has reversed this order. It’s not working out any better for him.

  CCWC is correct, as usual.

• Academic freedom for me, not for thee. Lest we forget there are still some wannabe speech cops on the faculty of once-prestigious institutions of higher learning, Gabrielle Temaat reports: Fire professors who oppose ‘gender-affirming care,’ Harvard faculty chair says.

  Professors who are critical of “gender-affirming care” should be fired and lose their academic titles, a Harvard University professor and faculty chair recently said.

  “There’s a particular place in hell for academics who use their academic expertise and power to distort and do violence to people in the world,” Professor Timothy McCarthy told Washington Square News. The New York University student newspaper interviewed McCarthy for his thoughts about two professors at the school who are affiliated with groups that are critical of surgical and chemical interventions for gender dysphoria.

  Note the link above goes to a student newspaper article that treats the important news is that these heretics, one employed as an adjunct in an NYU school, the other an alumnus, actually exist!

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