Happy April Fools Day! (No joke.)

Good afternoon from Washington, where I just watched a procedural effort to block allowing new parents to vote by proxy fail in the House of Representatives. Welcome to new subscribers!

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said legislative action for the rest of the week is cancelled as a result. (We’ll see.)

Unfortunately, Speaker Mike Johnson views such measures as unconstitutional, despite having voted that way himself in a previous Congress.

Today’s failure to whip votes is only the latest episode in an increasingly bitter fight over a bipartisan push to allow new parents to vote by proxy.

Honestly, while I support this effort, proxy voting remains a kludge. Congress should be distributed & resilient in the event of a natural disaster, act of war, or terrorism attack. That means fully remote voting & hearings.

A historic pandemic should have resulted in bringing Congress further into the 21st century, leading to full remote participation for voting and hybrid hearings in both chambers. I fear we will have to see the continuity of Congress fundamentally broken before there’s an institutional shift.

Beware the Jokes of April

Today is April Fool’s Day, which means jokes, hoaxes, & satires are everywhere, online and off.

If trust matters to you or your work, beware of eroding it by accident or intent. (Professional trolls & illiberal politicians have different calculus.)

Practice good information hygiene by sifting social media, just as you do offline by washing your hands. Whether you work in media or not, the Verification Handbook will be a good resource on April Fools Day & every day ahead.

Check every story that seems too good to be true before you share as fact. Read About pages. See if authors exist. Learn when a website was created, & by whom. Find other sources to corroborate. Then, start doing this every day you browse online or watch content in 2025! 🙂

Remember: “A lie is retweeted halfway around the world while the truth is still unlocking its smartphone”-Ben Franklin

The Constitutional Crisis is Here, Now

In 2013, I learned during a visit to the Ministry of Justice that the last remaining section of the Magna Carta that remains in effect in the United Kingdom is the following phrase: “NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor [condemn him,] but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.”

“Habeas Corpus” — Latin for having a body of evidence that supports allegations of a crime — remains fundamental to the rule of law and the due process every person is entitled to receive in the United States of America, under the suspension clause of Article I of the U.S. Constitution.

And yet, we have just seen persons detained and deported by the U.S. government without due process afforded to them under the law, with government lawyers defying court orders.

Separately, in a letter to Senator Patty Murray, OMB Director Russ Vought explained why the White House is breaking the law by taking down a website that showed if appropriations were being spent back on March 24.

Murray tweeted the letter out and denounced Vought’s rationalizations for deciding not to follow this law.

As she said, this “about basic transparency & holding any administration accountable. Murray right: Secrecy hides corruption.

If you’re unfamiliar with this law, Congress mandated the Office of Management and Budget make information on apportionments of federal funds available to the public in 2022.

This disclosure was a guardrail put in place after Trump had withheld appropriated military aid to extort an ally. Trump was impeached for doing this, as he should have been. He was not convicted, unfortunately, despite no one denying the facts shown to the public, press, & Senators. That emboldened him to keep abusing power, which he is now taking to new lows.

TBD: whether this Congress accepts more open defiance of this law, which seems likely, or others.

While the Washington Post seems determined to debate whether there's a constitutional crisis until after Trump orders marshals to bar the doors to the Supreme Court, the constitutional crisis began weeks ago, when the White House and U.S. DOGE Service began usurping the powers of Congress, from illegally impounding appropriated funds to dissolving federal agencies without an act of Congress.

To their credit, Senator Chuck Grassley & Senator Sheldon Whitehouse did send Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent a letter asking why the U.S. Treasury is trying to suspend enforcement of “the most important anti-money laundering law in decades," but their letter doesn't appear to have gotten the administration's attention, much less used power to check and balance an increasingly imperial executive branch.

Despite a growing number of judges repudiating the administration’s illiberalism, the health of our body politic is not looking great today. Many democracy scholars keep focusing on the history European fascists & fascism, but the truth is that American fascism rose long ago.

It’s far harder for US media to recognize fascism when it came wrapped in a flag & bearing a cross, preaching faith, family, & the gospel of hyper-patriotism, but far-right ultranationalism is surging here, showing contempt for the rule of law.

While I don’t agree with Bill Kristol on any number of things, he was spot-on this morning:

From its unlawful invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, to the frantic removal of these men already in custody in the United States to a brutal prison in a third country—the Trump administration had demonstrated purposeful contempt for the rule of law. They have compounded this contempt by defending their actions with demonstrable lies and misdirection.

So I’d go further than Abrego Garcia’s lawyer. If this reckless and lawless action by the administration is allowed to stand, it’s not just the immigration laws that are meaningless; it’s the rule of law that is meaningless.

There’s been much discussion in recent months of what the other branches would do, and of how the public would react, if the Trump administration were brazenly to defy the law and attempts by U.S. courts to uphold the law.

That’s no longer a hypothetical question. That future is now. The crisis is upon us. We’ll be judged as a nation by how we respond.

We will have to be brave, resilient, and lucky to keep our Republic.