Elon Musk Gaining Unprecedented Access to Government Information Via DOGE

Plutocrats United

Inside this WaPo story on the Musk/Ramaswamy divergence over DOGE’s goals, and Musk pushing his partner out, is this key information:

In his new role, Musk appears to have vast access to the inner workings of government that far exceeds the plan as initially conceived. The DOGE leader, also the chief executive of one company that has won billions of dollars in federal contracts and others that have faced significant federal scrutiny, will be able to deploy a team of handpicked software engineers to every government agency, where under Trump’s executive order they will be granted “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.” (Musk already has a White House email address, according to Bloomberg News.) Armed with sensitive data, Musk could draw on expertise gathered from his business empire — including deploying artificial intelligence — to achieve his aims, people familiar with the matter said….

Musk became increasingly convinced that DOGE should operate as a small team within the government, where it could get access to highly sensitive information and avoid lawsuits attempting to force disclosure of its meetings and minutes — several of which were, indeed, filed immediately after Trump was sworn in Monday.

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“Ranked Choice Voting May Be a Stepping Stone to Proportional Representation”

alternative voting systems

Eveline Dowling in The Fulcrum:

n the 2024 U.S. election, several states did not pass ballot initiatives to implement Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) despite strong majority support from voters under 65. Still, RCV was defended in Alaska, passed by a landslide in Washington, D.C., and has earned majority support in 31 straight pro-RCV city ballot measures. Still, some critics of RCV argue that it does not enhance and promote democratic principles as much as forms of proportional representation (PR), as commonly used throughout Europe and Latin America.

However, in the U.S. many people have not heard of PR. The question under consideration is whether implementing RCV serves as a stepping stone to PR by building public understanding and support for reforms that move away from winner-take-all systems. Utilizing a nationally representative sample of respondents (N=1000) on the 2022 Cooperative Election Survey (CES), results show that individuals who favor RCV often also know about and back PR. When comparing other types of electoral reforms, RCV uniquely transfers into support for PR, in ways that support for nonpartisan redistricting and the national popular vote do not. These findings can inspire efforts that demonstrate how RCV may facilitate the adoption of PR in the U.S….

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“Twenty-two States Sue to Stop Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order”

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NYT:

Attorneys general from 22 states sued President Trump in two federal district courts on Tuesday to block an executive order that refuses to recognize the U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants as citizens, the opening salvo in what promises to be a long legal battle over the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

Eighteen states and two cities, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., challenged the order in Federal District Court in Massachusetts, arguing that birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment is “automatic” and that neither the president nor Congress has the constitutional authority to revise it. Four other states filed a second lawsuit in the Western District of Washington….

“It’s so outlandish that it’s almost assured to be struck down,” predicted Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School, who expressed shock at the order’s breadth. Even someone like former Vice President Kamala Harris, whose mother was a foreign student when she was born, might be impacted in the future. “The person who drafted this order was not doing Donald Trump any favors.”…

There are signs the judiciary could be divided on the issue. Judge James C. Ho, whom Mr. Trump nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, has been more sympathetic to some of Mr. Trump’s arguments, likening unauthorized immigrants to an invading army. That comparison has also been made by lawyers for the State of Texas and another declaration by Mr. Trump that illegal crossings at the southern border amount to an “ongoing invasion.”

Still, that appeals court does not hear cases originating in Massachusetts, and other courts are unlikely to even consider the Trump administration’s arguments about constitutional interpretation without a new law from Congress, said Gerard Magliocca, a professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. He cited recent cases where the Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch can’t single-handedly address the biggest political controversies, known as “major questions.”

“If that’s true of student loans or Covid-19 rules or whatever, you’d think it would be true of citizenship as well,” he said. “The states are right and the courts are probably going to agree with them.”…

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“A Trump Executive Order Sets Out What Could Be a Road Map for Retribution”

authoritarian threats in US

NYT:

Since his election victory, President Trump has said he would not seek retribution against his perceived enemies. “I’m not looking to go into the past,” he said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Retribution will be through success.”

But in an executive order he signed on Monday night, Mr. Trump made clear that he has every intention to seek out and possibly punish government officials in the Justice Department and America’s intelligence agencies as a way to “correct past misconduct” against him and his supporters.

It would be justice, the order said, against officials from the Biden administration who carried out an “unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.”

This is what retribution could look like during the second Trump presidency: payback dressed up in the language of victimhood.

That executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” came amid a blizzard of other actions on Monday evening.

They included a highly unusual separate order that stripped the security clearances of dozens of former intelligence officials whom Mr. Trump has viewed as his political enemies. Another order gave the White House authority to grant immediate top-secret security clearance to any official for up to six months, circumventing the traditional background process managed by the F.B.I. and the intelligence community.

Taken together, these actions reveal the beginnings of a far more methodical approach by Mr. Trump to root out his perceived enemies within the government compared with his first term. Mr. Trump even used his Inaugural Address to raise the issue, saying that the scales of justice would be “rebalanced” after “the vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government.”

Charles Kupperman, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Trump during his first term, said he viewed the executive order as the first step in an effort that could result in criminal investigations.

“It looks like the beginning of a retribution campaign because it’s backward looking,” Mr. Kupperman said. “He’s still grappling with the past four years, and this is not the right outlet for him to play this out. It plays to his MAGA base, but it’s not the right one for the country.”…

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“There’s reason to be worried about the plethora of pardons from Trump and Biden”

authoritarian threats in US

Kyle Cheney for Politico:

Over a span of 12 hours, two presidents went on a clemency spree.

The extraordinary wave of pardons Monday — from Joe Biden as he left the White House and from Donald Trump as soon as he returned to it — demonstrate the potency of the Constitution’s pardon power, but also expose its perils, constitutional scholars say.

The pardon power — a relic of English monarchs that was adopted by America’s founders as a way to extend grace and mercy in exceptional circumstances — can’t be checked by Congress or the courts. And in a country gripped by political rancor, that power is increasingly prone to abuse, experts say.

Both presidents, on the same day, stretched the pardon power to new, questionable frontiers in wildly different ways.

“It was perhaps a constitutional mistake to give the president this one unchecked, unilateral power,” said Mark Rozell, a George Mason University expert on presidential power. “Madison believed that any power granted without institutional checks would be abused. The recent exercises of the pardon power by two presidents proves he was right.”

Biden kicked off the pardon binge when he granted preemptive clemency to political allies, including Gen. Mark Milley, a former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Covid czar Anthony Fauci, members of the Jan. 6 committee and, minutes before departing the White House, his own siblings and their spouses. In each case, Biden described them as potential targets of a vengeful Trump administration.

Trump, on the other hand, delivered massive blanket clemency to virtually all of the roughly 1,600 people who have been prosecuted in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including hundreds of people who assaulted police and a dozen convicted of a sedition plot….

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