Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. So could DOGE kill off judicial abuses? I
don't know if this was the intention or if this
is just gravy, but either way, I am here for it.
DOGE the Department of Government Efficiency, which, despite what apparently
a lot of people on the left and in the
media but I repeat myself, believe they think this is
some sort of a new agency, it's actually not. It's
just a rebrand of an existing thing that was created
by Barack Obama. So they're going through they're finding waste fraud, abuse,
they're putting people on paid leave, they're offering early retirements
and stuff. They're just cutting cut, cut cut, And to
quote Kevin O'Leary, and one of the things though that
this has prompted aside from the wailing and the gnashing
of teeth and the three person press conference outside of
the various government agencies and such, and the weird defense
by Democrats of bureaucrats and like, I can't believe they
hate irs auditors so much? Who are these American people?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: Aside from all of that, we could be seeing a
dismantling of injunction abuse, injunctive relief. It know, that's it's
not pink eye. It's although it is kind of as
annoying and apparently as contagious as of late. But no,
this is where people judge shop. Democrats mainly go to
a court and try to get a court to stop
something from happening across the entire country. And all they
have to do is convince one judge at a federal
district level. So the AP who takes whatever Hamas says
at face value, the AP still not allowed on Air
Force one because they don't they don't want to call
it the Gulf of America. They will call everybody by pronouns,
and they will you know, mess with our language in
all sorts of other ways, and then direct every newsroom
that subscribes to the AP Stylebook to do so as well.
So but they will not be dictated to by a
Republican when it comes to the Gulf of America. So
they did a story on Doge notching court room win
labor unions, Democrats, and federal employees. But I repeat myself
have filed several lawsuits arguing that DOGE is running rough
shod over privacy protections or usurping power from other branches
of government. But judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents
haven't always gone along with those arguments, at least so far.
Most notably, DOGE critics are failing to obtain temporary restraining
orders or troros. Okay, this is what the lawyers do.
We saw this in North count We've seen it in
North Carolina ever since the Republicans won control of the
General Assembly. You get these leftist nonprofits that rushed to
a judge in Durham or Wait County or something, and
they get one judge to issue some sort of an injunction,
filing a temporary restraining order to prevent a law from
taking effect across the entire state. Right, and this is
what is happening at the national level too. Where you
go and you find a forum with a sympathetic judge,
with an allied, philosophical, fellow traveler judge, and they issue
a restraining order preventing something from occurring across the entire country,
even though the rest of the country is not a
party to the actual lawsuit. So the latest is Judge
Randolph Moss, an Obama appointee, by the way, and this
is a case involving the Office of Personnel Management, and
the judge there said, it's not the job of the
federal courts to police the security of the information systems
in the executive branch, because the fear is that, oh
my gosh, these doge employees, they're going to have access
to this information, and it's that makes it insecure, and
oh my god, look at all the terrible things that
could happen if we let them do their jobs right
and so and so the people go and they file
the lawsuits, and the judges in some cases have said,
I'm very concerned as well, but a fear of something
that might happen is not irreparable harm. And that's why
you would allow a tro right because it hasn't happened yet.
Trump has been blocked at least temporarily in his efforts
to limit birthright citizenship, to freeze congressionally authorized foreign aid,
and to stop some healthcare services for transgender youth. There
you go, there's another example of the associated press. They
refer to it as healthcare services for transgender youth. Okay
later in this piece. An exception to Doge's legal victories
has been two lawsuits regarding Treasury Department systems, which are
used to distribute trillions of dollars in federal money. The
databases can include sensitive information like bank accounts and social
Security numbers, and they're traditionally maintained by only non partisan
career officials because obviously, if you work for the federal government,
you're obviously nonpartisan. Right. A judge in Washington restricted Doge's
access to two staff members, while another judge in New
York has temporarily blocked Doge altogether. They go on to
quote a couple different people, Norm Eisen of all people,
but they then asked John you why oh, and if
that name rings the ballots, because he was the one
that came up with the defense of the waterboarding and
such during the War on terror. Right, he was a
bush guy. He's now a law professor at University California
in Berkeley, and he said an important factor has been
the administration's contention that Musk is a presidential advisor without
any independent authority. He said there are echoes of another
legal battle from the nineteen nineties when Hillary Clinton chaired
a healthcare task force as First Lady Remember Hillary Care.
A federal appeals court in Washington, DC ruled that the
task force did not need to comply with rules on
open meetings, so they could hold their meetings in closed session,
basically outside the view of the public. So a federal
appeals court ruled in favor of Hillary Clinton's task force
holding secret meetings. Okay, because it's just a task force. Heywo,
consequences of my own actions. Yes, we meet again. So
you got the ruling you wanted for that, and now
that's precedent. And now you're trying to argue the opposite
because it's Elon Musk who actually is not holding the
private meetings, actually posting all of this stuff onto social media.
A major victory for Trump and Musk came in Boston,
where US District Judge Georgie O'Toole Junior allowed the administration
to implement its deferred resignation program. Commonly described as a
buy out. The program allows workers to quit while still
getting paid until September thirtieth. It was challenged by a
group of labor unions who called anybody who took the
deal a scab. Remember that O'Toole, by the way, it
was a Clinton appointee. The judge also decided Randolph Moss
that judge decided not to block Musk's team from viewing
Education Department data. More on that in a bit, but
he pointed out that DOGE employees had testified in court
papers they would follow laws around information sharing. So they've
said we're going to follow all the laws on that district.
Judge John Bates, a W. Bush appointee, did not stand
in the way of Doge's involvement at the Department of Labor,
the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau. Although Baits said he had concerns about
the privacy issues raised, he found the evidence did not
justify a court block. Okay, the lawyers say the DOGE
team is not running rampant accessing any data system they desire,
and they have gotten security training and they have signed
non disclosure agreements. Okay, so that sets the table, right.
You got all the lawsuits trying to get these temporary
restraining orders. And if it seems confusing, that's because it
is all right. If you're listening to this show, you
know I try to keep up with all sorts of
current events, and I know you do too, And and
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources.
Why well, because it's how you detect media bias, which
is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's
an app, and it's a website, and it combines news
from around the world in one place so you can
compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out
at check dot ground, dot news slash pete. I put
the link in the podcast description too. I started using
ground News a few months ago and more recently chose
to work with them as an affiliate because it lets
me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom.
The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored
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your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports ground news as they make the media landscape
more transparent. All right, so I mentioned a couple of cases,
these requests for injunctive relief or temporary restraining orders against
various things the Doge and the Trump administration has been
trying to do up in Massachusetts or should I call
it Hamassachusetts. I'm not sure they have blocked. A judge
up there blocked the Trump administration's rate change to NIH
grants national institutes for a National Institute for Health the grants,
and this is nuts. Elon Musk responded to this, calling
it deeply wrong. He said, a judge blocked dropping the
overhead charged, which is like administrative and all that like
non program related costs. So when you apply for a
grant with the NIH, you're allowed to get the overhead
as a percentage of the total grant. You can get
like sixty percent of that grant to go to just overhead,
not the actual research. So obviously this is why these
you know, unc Duke University, right, this is why they
they hire grant writers because if you can just keep
the flow of grants coming, you can pay for all
these other facilities and personnel and whatever the overhead is.
You just keep offloading those costs and paying for it
with federal taxpayer dollars. And what the doge guys or
as I've seen, who was this that sent the email?
Dennis suggests we call them the musketeers, the Doge musketeers
if you will. That they're just saying, no, sixty percent
overhead is nuts. It should be tops fifteen fifteen percent. Look,
if you're donating money to a charity, you don't You
shouldn't donate money to a charity if more than fifteen
percent is going to their overhead, to their administrator of costs.
Every dollar I give to a charitable organization, I want
the most amount of money. In fact, I usually want
it to be around ninety cents of every dollar to
go to the program, not to overhead, not to administrative.
So that's another example. And then a federal judge Yes
or Sorry Tuesday declined to block Elon Musk's Department of
Government Efficiency from accessing government data or firing federal employees.
US District Judge Tanya Chuckcan or Chootcan shut Cain anyway,
She declined to grant the plaintiff's request for a temporary
restraining order, saying that their failure to demonstrate evidence of
their reparable harm caused by Doge's accent access that's the reason.
She's like, Yeah, you can call into question what appears
to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and
an entity that was not created by Congress and over
which it has no oversight. In these circumstances, though it
has to be indisputable that this court acts within the
bounds of its authority, she says, it cannot issue a
tro temporary restraining order, especially one as wide ranging as
plaintiffs request, without clear evidence of imminent irreparable harm to
these plaintiffs. The decision is a blow to the coalition
of fourteen Democrat state attorneys general who sued to temporarily
restrict Doge's access to federal data about government employees. Those
states argued that the leadership role held by Musk represents
an unlawful delegation of executive power and threatened what they
described as widespread disruption to employees working across various federal
agencies and government contractors. Disruption is not illegal, right, it's
not illegal. And then, of course New Mexico Attorney General
Raoul Torres, there's no greater threat to democracy then the
accumulation of state power in the hands of a single
unelected individual, which is doesn't that kind of happen already
at the bureaucratic level. By the way, North Carolina not
part of this lawsuit. I was as surprised as you, Doge.
This is according to the piece at Fox News, the
Musk led agency was created via executive order earlier this year.
Its status as a temporary organization within the White House
gives Doge and its employees eighteen months to carry out
its goals of optimizing the federal government, streamlining its operations,
and doing it all at a lower cost. Keep in mind,
this is not the creation of a new entity. It
is the renaming of an existing one that Obama created. Again,
you guys on the left were the ones that created
all of this infrastructure. Now you're mad that somebody is
using it to undermine your policy preferences and ideological goals.
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make memories that'll last a lifetime. So DOGE has this
wide ranging mission, and according to Fox News, combined with
its lack of specifics, if sparked fresh concerns from outside
observers who have questioned how exactly the group plans to
deliver on its ambitious optimization goals in such a short
amount of time. And I'm wondering if those people think that, well,
they probably have no ex experience in the private sector
as a business owner, right, because you can actually do
this stuff very quickly. Trust me, I've had it done
to me. It happens very quickly. But Musk and his
allies have wasted little time racing to do just that.
They've spent the last past month racing to deliver on
what they see as one of Trump's biggest campaign trail pledges,
reducing bloated federal budgets, aggressively slashing government waste, and firing
or putting on ice large swaths of federal employees. And
that brings me to mister Wonderful aka Kevin O'Leary, he
of the shark Tank fame. He was on CNN and
he is loving what he is seeing.
Speaker 2: I think the issue is they're not whacking enough. There's
this concept in private equity when you get a bankrupt
company and you go in there, you cut twenty percent
more than your initial read, and then you find like
a pool of mercury. The organization jells back together again.
Always cut deeper, harder when there's fat and waste. The FAA,
it's not the people. The code is cobalt, it's from
the sixties. It needs cap X put into it for
the technology to be upgraded to make it safer.
Speaker 1: Fat like a chicken.
Speaker 2: All of these agencies are like big fat chickens dripping
over barbecues of fat. This is the best barbecue I've
ever seen. But I don't think it's happening fast enough.
They're not cutting enough. Keep slashing, keep packing. While you
have a twenty four month mandate before the midterms. Cut cut, cut, cut, cut.
Speaker 1: More more cutting.
Speaker 2: Believe me, it's gonna work out just great.
Speaker 1: Everybody's nuclear codes. Cut them to cut everything.
Speaker 2: Because if you don't see what they're doing, and they
can't show you that they're adding value, you whack.
Speaker 1: You whack right. No, not you, Jeffrey Tubin, not you
at all. Right. So this brings me now to the
larger issue here, which is the judicial abuses that we
have seen. Okay, and all of this whacking and cutting
and filing of the lawsuits seeking temporary restraining orders, this
might actually force the US Supreme Court to do something
about this injunctive relief abuse. Right, this lawfare tactic that
the left has been using, and now increasingly the right
as well, of going to a judge, getting a temporary
restraining order and stopping some sort of government action that
you don't like. It's like a venue for policy disagreement.
And that's not what the courts are supposed to be
used for. They're supposed to be there to clear out
the federal district courts are supposed to clear out a
lot of the less important cases. So not everything goes
all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court
would not have time to hear all the cases from
all across the country. They are they are mechanisms for
the US Supreme Court right to distribute the workload. But
Gorsich Neil Gorsch, one of the Supreme Court justices and
also Clarence Thomas in a case from like five years ago.
They were talking about this process, Gorsich said. He says,
despite the fluid state of some things, we now have
an injunction to rule over all of them. They were
ruling on some injunction, the one before us, in which
a single judge in New York and joined the government
from applying a new definition to anybody without regard to
geography or participation in this lawsuit or any other lawsuit.
This one lawsuit, and it's affecting the entire country, and
nobody else is a plaintiff to this case. It's just
this one plaintiff here. The second Circuit declined to stay
issue a stay for this particular injunction. And now, after
so many trips up and down and all around the
judicial map, the government brings its well rehearsed arguments before us.
The real problem here, he says, is the increasingly common
practice of trial courts ordering relief that transcends the cases
before them. What is he saying, This is a warning
shot that you, district court level judges, you are outside
your lanes. When a district court orders the government not
to enforce a rule against the plaintiffs in the case
before it, the court redresses the injury that gives rise
to its jurisdiction in the first place. But if a
court goes further than that, ordering the government to take
or not take some specific action with respect to people
who are strangers to the suit, well, then it's hard
to see how the court could still be acting in
the judicial role of resolving cases and controversies. Injunctions like
these thus raise serious questions about the scope of court's
equitable powers under Article three. This is actually the constitutional
crisis here lefties it has become increasingly apparent. He goes
on to say that the court must, this court, the
Supreme Court, has to at some point confront these important
objections to this increasingly widespread practice. He says this case
illustrates the routine issuance of universal injunctions and that this
is unworkable. It sows chaos for the litigants, for the government,
for the courts, and everybody affected by the conflicting decisions
that get made first at the district level, then at
appeals court level. Then it goes back to the district
and then that gets a ruling, and then that gets
appealed and then it goes to the appeals court, and
then that gets appealed or sent back. Its back and
forth and up and down, and everybody's in a state
of chaos in the meantime. And he's like, you're supposed
to be looking at these individual cases in a methodical way,
developing your arguments and your evidence, and the cases are
supposed to be limited to the people participating in the cases.
But now, he says, you have both sides forced to
rush from one preliminary injunction hearing to another, leaping from
one emergency stay application to the next, each with potentially
nationwide stakes, and all based on expedited briefings and little
opportunity for the adversarial testing of the evidence. This is
not normal. He says that this is not normal. Universal
injunctions have little basis in traditional equitable practice, and they
hardly seem an innovation we should rush to embrace. He's like,
we shouldn't be doing this. By their nature, this kind
of a sweeping universal injunction forces judges into making rushed decisions,
high stakes decisions, while having low information. There's a trifecta
of damassary. What are we doing? He didn't say that
I'm saying that he would not put that in the
in the opinion, the rise of nationwide injunctions may be
just a sign of our impatient times, he says. But
he said there are costs. There are right now more
than a thousand active and senior district court judges in
ninety four judicial districts and subject to review in twelve
regional courts of appeal. Because plaintiffs generally are not bound
by you know, adverse decisions against them in cases to
which they are not a party, there is nearly a
boundless opportunity to shop for a friendly forum to secure
a win nationwide. Right, That's that's the feature. It's not
a bug. That's the reason why the tactic exists. That's
why the left has done this is so they can
forum shop. They can find a lawyer with a wardrobe
change that agrees with them, that they know is quote,
you know, on their side, and then they go to
that judge, and they get one judge in one venue
that they know will agree with them to issue an
injunction that affects the entire country, and it slows down
whatever the Republicans are trying to do. It's lawfare and
it's been called out in the past by Supreme Court judges,
and maybe the flurry of suits we're seeing from regarding
DOGE might make a change now, might lead to some
sort of a change. We can hope. All right, I
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message on the Twitter machine from Eric. It's a pet tweet,
he says. The BS North Carolina had to go through
over its voter ID encompasses so many good case studies
on the habitual abuse of the courts, particularly by Democrats. Correct, correct, Right,
We had a voter ID law that took almost I
think maybe even longer than a decade to implement, after
dozens of other states enacted voter ID laws that were
way more stringent than ours, and the left just kept suing.
They just kept suing, and it got to a point
where it's like, you guys really just don't want any
kind of election security, do you. I'm okay with election security.
I just want anybody to be able to vote. Really,
and uh, let's not even ask them their names like
they You never hear Democrats talking about election security to
this point. You never hear them talk about it. It's
always about access, access, access. We want more people voting.
We want everybody to vote, you know, like it's going
to get to a point where it's like we're going
to have left wing nonprofits going to people's homes and
getting them to vote. Like that's I think where they
want to go with all of it. Like we're going
to make it so easy to vote that you don't
even have to vote yourself, just have just have somebody
else cast your ballot for you, and then everybody's participating. Yay,
and no fraud there. Back to this opinion that was
written by Gorsic. This was again from twenty twenty in
a case unrelated to any of the Doge stuff. But
he's he's firing a warning shot. Oh sorry, Trickle, He's
firing a warning shot to the left and to this
lawfare tactic and these judges at the lower levels in
the federal district system that are doing these sweeping injunctions
granting temporary restraining orders against laws, and the orders then
lock down things across the entire country. We saw this
also with the quote Muslim ban, which wasn't a ban
on Muslims, right, This was the travel Band saying we're
not going to take people from these countries that hate
us right, and then you get one judge someplace in
San Francisco, it's like you gonta do that, and then
nobody can do it, and then the whole federal government
has to stop because one judge someplace made a ruling
and has it applied to everybody. And the lawyers know this,
and so they forum shop, they judge shop, They go
around and look for a judge that they think will
be They know who they are. That's why, like so
many of these cases in North Carolin with the voter
id stuff went through a judge out of Greensborough. I
forget his name, but they would go in front of
him all the time because they knew that he was
an ally. Gorsuch says the risk of winning conflicting nationwide
injunctions is real and the stakes are asymmetric. If a
single successful challenge is enough to stop a rule across
the entire country, the government's hope of implementing any new
policy could face the long odds of a straight sweep,
parlaying a ninety four to zero win in the district
courts into a twelve to zero victory in the court
of appeal, a single loss and the policy goes on ice,
maybe for good or for some indeterminate period of time,
until another court jumps in to grant another stay, and
then all of that can repeat ad infinitum until either
one side gives up or the US Supreme Court agrees
to hear the case. What in this gamesmanship and chaos
can we be proud of? I concur in the Court's
decision in this case. But I hope too that we
might add an appropriate juncture take up some of the
underlying constitutional questions raised by the rise of nationwide injunctions.
Gorsic is already there, Okay. Gorsich already wants to do something.
Clarence Thomas wants to do something. He has spoken about
this in other opinions in the past as well. Okay,
so you already have this, this sentiment on the US
Supreme Court. They recognize the problem, they recognize the chaos
that is created by this kind of lawfair tactic. And
hopefully you get enough of these cases that get brought
and you're going to start testing all of these different injunctions,
and it might open up this question sort of at
a larger level of what can the US Supreme Court do?
How can they direct the lower courts to quit their
bs right, stop it, to stop doing this stuff. I
don't know. I'm not a Supreme Court expert. I don't
know how they would go about doing it, but fingers crossed.
All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. I could not do the show
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