The Outsider Perspective Issue 430 | The Beltway Outsiders

If you’d like to read this issue on my website, click here! If you’d like to sign-up, and receive this in your inbox each week, click here! Read past issues here.

Good Friday Morning! And Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone except Domino’s Pizza. The fast-food pizza chain is celebrating the holiday by launching a pepperoni-inspired perfume. “The limited-edition eau de toilette is a nod to its Pepperoni Passion pizza and is said to have irresistible notes of spice, pepper and a woody, warm base.“

What made Dominios get in on holiday fun? It’s a massive day for ordering pizza: “Domino’s revealed it typically sees a 50 percent increase of its Pepperoni Passion pizza each year on Valentine’s Day, based on a five-year average of day-on-day increases. The pizza producers are also expecting to make over one million pizzas for lovers on February 14 this year.”

Luke Debono, the model in the Domino’s Pizza ads for this perfume, chipped in: “What could be more attractive to a partner than a smoky, spicy scent that sparks passion?” So there you go, ladies. Don’t rush the stage all at once.

This week, I’m going to do some broad coverage of the various legal cases and “scandals” surrounding the new Trump administration. Some of the outrage is warranted, but much of it isn’t. I’ll dig into both below—links to follow.

Quick Hits:

Firing U.S. attorneys is standard practice unless you’re a journalist covering Republicans. Every time parties change administrations, the U.S. Attorneys get a changeover. They’re not career positions, but the press covers Democrats getting fired as “a terrifying moment for democracy.“ Clinton and Bush cleared all of them out, and it’s a standard practice.
The caveat: U.S. Attorneys resigning over the Eric Adams investigation getting dropped is a bigger deal. The NYPost reports that the prosecutors were getting ready to charge Adams with destroying evidence as part of the broader investigation into the NY Mayor. Why Trump’s DOJ dropped this is beyond me, but I wouldn’t have done it.
We’ve reached 6,000 subscribers at The American Almanac. The reviews are great, and the interaction is extremely high. Thank you to everyone for sharing this new project and signing up! (You can Sign up here for free!)

Where you can find me this week

Please subscribe, rate, and review The Horse Race on YouTube — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter.

Trump’s Honeymoon Period Continues – Conservative Institute

Elizabeth Warren Crushed By Her Own Frankenstein Creation – Conservative Institute

Donald Trump Brings Full Pressure To Hamas And Iran – Conservative Institute

Always Give Trump Stories 24 Hours To Breathe

I realized this week that I was going to have to dust off some old rules for covering Trump stories. Normally, when a new administration enters office, there’s this transition phase where you figure out how they act and how to read stories about them. With Trump, it’s the first time we had the rules, switched leaders, and now we’re back to Trump.

The first rule I had with any Trump outrage from 2016-2020 was to give the story 24 hours to breathe. Whatever the left is mad about likely has a kernel of truth, but the odds you’re getting the whole story are likely wrong. And with Trump going full “shock and awe,” the left is still rocketing straight to 11 on a scale of 10 on every story.

And, dear reader, there are a lot of stories—boatloads of stories. I have liberal friends coming to me blaming Trump for hot inflation data, and the man hasn’t been in office long enough to have factored into the January data we got this week. At this stage, it is impossible to blame Trump for the last weeks of data from the Biden administration.

He hasn’t even been in office for a month yet!

I thought it would be helpful this week to do a quick breakdown of the big legal cases Trump has before him and where they stand.

First, the most constitutional things:

The buyout offer to federal employees. The federal judge let this go through, finding that the unions who sued didn’t have standing. The Trump buyout isn’t different from the program Bill Clinton/Al Gore administered in 1993. I’ve seen no valid argument blocking it.

Firing the heads of federal agencies. Admittedly, Trump will have to challenge Supreme Court case law on this one, but his firings will get upheld. The Supreme Court has been heading in the President’s decision for several years on this front, and I see nothing to stop that momentum. Column here.

Zeroing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild, and how Trump’s team wrecked this agency is a work of art. Warren built this agency to avoid oversight and be independently funded. Trump’s nominee zeroed the budget and sent everyone home, and no one can stop it. Column here. It’s truly a chef’s kiss bit of political work.

Elon Musk, DOGE, and reviewing Treasury and other systems are the big stories that Democrats are having a cow over. I also don’t see any illegalities in it, even if the DOGE guys are accessing Treasury systems with edit privileges.

To understand this, you have to read through the actual executive order. DOGE is an Obama-era program that Trump’s team renamed to DOGE. The Obama program was “The United States Digital Service.” The Congressional Research Service did a helpful report on DOGE explaining its authorities and powers. Critically:

The E.O. also directs the USDS administrator to implement a “Software Modernization Initiative,” which would seek to improve the efficiency of federal software and information technology (IT) systems as well as promote interoperability among agency networks and systems. To facilitate this effort, agency heads are directed to provide USDS “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.”

You can see the legacy USDS service and its website here. It was formed in 2014 when Obama’s healthcare website crashed spectacularly, and all the promises of Obamacare went up in flames in a few weeks. The resulting fallout helped sweep Republicans into a Senate majority that cost Democrats a Supreme Court seat.

Obama, however, formed USDS to overhaul the website and get it up and running. He also allowed this new agency to overhaul the tech and workings of multiple other agencies. It was a technical SWAT team that worked nonstop until the Healthcare.gov website was running. After that, they hit up every government agency.

Musk’s point of modernizing and finding bad technology in the government—for instance, questioning why employee records are done by hand in a limestone mine or why there are people 150 years old on the Social Security rolls—are basic questions of this Obama program.

The funding for DOGE and the basic framework are secure. I can see some judges trying to nibble at the edges of it. However, the basic framework was designed, built, and used by the Obama team to do the same thing. Trump and Biden used it in their terms, too. Former Obama administration aides, the Pod Save America crew, even said they wished they’d done some of what Musk is doing now.

Also, the idea that some judges and liberals have floated that the Treasury Secretary should be blocked from accessing Treasury systems is so ludicrous that anyone suggesting it is a moron. He was approved by the Senate and is a cabinet official. You can’t block a constitutional official like that.

Second, the least constitutional orders:

Overturning birthright citizenship. I’ve read the legal arguments in favor of this and find nothing compelling. I think this executive order gets overturned 9-0 at the Supreme Court. Full column here.

Freezing grants and payments already allocated by Congress. This is a thorny issue, but if Congress has already allocated the money towards a program, I don’t believe the executive has much power to stop it, which is why courts have blocked it.

Congress attempted to give the President some of this authority via the line item veto power. However, the Supreme Court struck that down in Clinton vs. New York in 1998. Ultimately, Congress will have to step in with these programs.

Closing agencies created and funded by Congress. Aside from the CFPB, shuttering things like USAID and the Education Department will take an act of Congress. I’m not against shuttering them, but hacking at them in the current manner only slows them down. USAID needs to be consolidated into the State Department for more oversight, at a minimum.

There are other cases, but these are the main ones I’ve been tracking. As I said at the beginning, give every Trump outrage 24 hours to breathe, then figure out the facts and law. It’ll keep you sane and on the right track.

Links of the week

Dem Gov Gretchen Whitmer takes antisemitic radical on official Middle East trip – Free Beacon

UCLA Suspends Students for Justice in Palestine Chapters After Agitators Vandalize Jewish Chancellor’s Home – Free Beacon

Matt Schlapp, CPAC Chairman, allegedly sexually assaulted a man at a bar, witnesses say. – Yashar Ali

Musk’s Government Crusade Is Legal—and All-American: DOGE’s mandate is built on sound law and the will of the voters – City Journal

Marco Rubio: The Americas’ Golden Age begins now – Fox News

Why the Trump administration is fixated on Latin America – Vox

Democrats welcome Musk to ‘slash Pentagon’ spending in a DOGE about-face – Washington Examiner

How to Dismantle the Department of Education: GOP presidential candidates have long vowed to shrink or abolish the department, but its budget has only grown. – City Journal

The Next Pandemic? – James Meigs, Commentary

X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon blasts employees over return to office policies.