Jeff Childers postulates that President Trump and his allies foresaw conflict with the courts years ago, following his loss to President Biden in 2020, and began planning for it even then.
In 2021, [Sean] Spicer was (obviously) no longer serving as Press Secretary, but Trump had appointed him to two positions, including as a member of the Naval Academy Visitor’s Board. In September 2021, with only three months left in his Congressionally-defined term, Biden sent Spicer an email notifying him that he’d been fired. He thought, well, that’s that.
It turned out that Joe Biden made history by firing all Trump’s appointees to nonpartisan service academy boards before their statutory three-year terms ended. It was unprecedented. It had never happened before.
Then Spicer got a call from America First Legal. They asked him to join a lawsuit intended to force Biden to argue he has the absolute authority to fire anyone in the Executive Branch, including appointees to boards with statutory terms.
The District Court dismissed the case, interpreting the statute in a way that allowed Biden to fire Spicer despite this three-year term. They appealed. In the meantime, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled, in a parallel case (Severino v. Biden), that a presidential appointee in a similar position was removable at will by the President.
And it was done.
The law firm, America First Legal, is a conservative legal advocacy organization founded in April 2021 by former Trump administration officials. Until July of last year, America First Legal was a member of the advisory board for Project 2025, which is widely believed to provide the template for Trump’s plan to drain the Swamp.
In other words, drawing a few obvious inferences, Trump began working on this plan immediately after Biden took office in 2021.
While corporate media was busy calling Biden’s historic 2021 firings a routine housecleaning, President Trump’s legal teams were already laying a legal landscape for his second term. Spicer’s case wasn’t about getting his job back—it was about setting a legal precedent to let Trump clean house on day one of his second term.
Biden fired Spicer, AFL sued, and the far-left DC courts predictably ruled Biden could fire termed federal employees at will. Now Trump can fire them at will, too.
This wasn’t just a lawsuit; It was a strategic booby trap—forcing Biden’s own DOJ to argue on the record that the President has unlimited authority to remove Executive Branch appointees, even those with statutory terms. They fell right into the trap.
I suspect that, as things go on, we’ll find more examples of how Trump took the Democrats’ worst excesses during the painful Biden years and turned things around on them. They thought they were cleaning house. Instead, they were clearing the runway for Trump. That is why the Democrats are in disarray.
There's more at the link.
I believe the technical term is "hoist with his own petard". Very canny . . .
Peter
5 comments:
What's that saying about 5-dimensional chess? Getting the Biden courts to guarantee that Trump can do the same thing is right up there.
It is pretty amusing... And as they did force the issue during the last administration and thus set precedent... "Oops"?
Double ditto, Sig and Paul!
i hate to bring this up-
perhaps there was more to q than understood?
Indeed "Hoist by/on their own Petard" applies all over the place . DOGE is a renamed/repurposed Obama era admin group. To use another metaphor "They have stepped on their own crank". And in many ways the current plan seems to encourage them to engage in similar behavior if they act before they think.
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