The Social World

Category: Law

  • Federal judges crave the spotlight

    Federal judges crave the spotlight

    In the great injunction sweepstakes that have followed Donald Trump’s second administration like a shadow, we have seen district court judges with a hankering for executive power attempt to play president in more than a hundred cases from immigration and tariffs to funding various executive branch agencies, so-called trans-rights, DEI and climate change.

    Some of these injunctions and temporary restraining orders are still pending. Many, perhaps most, have been resolved by the Supreme Court in ways that favor the Trump administration, not always categorically but usually by affirming the broad scope of executive power envisioned by Article II of the Constitution. “The executive Power,” quoth that magisterial document, “shall be vested in a president of the United States of America.” “A president,” mind you, a single one. Not a president and hundreds of district court judges.

    The rousing start to Article II of the Constitution is neatly put, isn’t it? But those judges took it as a challenge. Trump is an affront to what every right-thinking, i.e., left-leaning, person believes. He wants to make America more prosperous, freer and more secure than it has become in the hands of Democrats and other disciples of hegemonic bureaucracy.

    He moved quickly to secure the border.  Can you believe it? He is deporting scads of people who are here illegally. Outrageous. He outlawed the racist practice of DEI throughout the federal government and made federal funds contingent upon ending the scam. Horrible. He thinks that the military should be an institution specializing in fighting wars, not promoting “social justice.” Clearly he must be stopped.

    Like many pro-Trump commentators, I have weighed in early and often on this legal-political charade. It is a legal charade because what we have witnessed since Trump took office again in January 2025 has been a mind-boggling misuse and hypertrophy of judicial power. Whoever would have thought that a lowly district court judge (there are some 700 of them) would successfully arrogate to himself the authority to tell the President what executive agencies he should pay for and which he should close?

    It is a political charade, or worse, because what we are witnessing is the triumph of partisan passions uber alles. In case after case, judges ruled to stymie the executive branch for one main reason: because it is overseen by President Trump.

    Nevertheless, until recently, most of the cases brought had a certain weight or specific gravity. It matters, after all, whether the border is sealed, whether DEI is allowed to trump merit, whether criminal aliens are allowed to roam the streets, whether fantasies of a climate emergency are allowed to choke off the robust exploitation of our national energy resources. In many instances, the matters at hand are important. It’s just that judges think that they, having correct (i.e., politically correct) beliefs, are therefore empowered to decide how public policy should proceed. It is they who decide what happens, not this strange bumpkin from Queens who somehow bamboozled the voting public into shoehorning him into the White House.

    Clearly, there is a lot of injunction envy going around official judicial circles these days, especially in the deep blue redoubts that specialize in that species of hubristic bullying. Is there a faster way to get your name and your mug plastered across the news sites? That, anyway, would seem to explain Dabney L. Friedrich, a district court judge for Washington, DC. I try to wheel out Karl Marx’s one certified amusing mot at least once a year. It is time. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), Marx cites Hegel’s observation that great figures and events tend to occur twice. He forgot to add, says Marx, that they appear first as tragedy, then as farce.

    It matters whether we have a secure southern border. It is important that the Department of Government Efficiency be allowed to help curb spending and thereby make a dent in our unsustainable federal debt (currently an eye-watering$37 trillion). But how about power washing, repointing and painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the sprawling excrescence just west of the White House? Mark Twain called the 1888 structure the “ugliest building in America.” Eisenhower didn’t much like the eponymous building either. But it is home to some 1,500 federal worker bees, including the Vice-President.

    The complex, looming building, designed by Alfred B. Mullett in a sort of super-sized Second Empire style, sits like a giant gray toad next to the White House. On November 12, Trump told Fox News presenter Laura Ingraham that he wanted to spruce up the grimy behemoth and paint it white (no, not gold, as some were saying).

    Not so fast, said Judge Friedrich. The preservationist lobby prompted her to enjoin the administration from doing anything in the way of architectural ablutions at least until the end of the year. The administration agreed. But the headlines have been hilarious. “Federal Judge Dabney L. Friedrich has now ordered Trump not to power wash the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.”

    Oh dear. What will they think to prohibit next? “Federal Judge Makeme A. Offer prohibits Trump from playing golf.” “Federal Judge Whack A. Mole orders Trump never to use gold leaf again.” The Entertainment Committee, as Bill Buckley liked to say, never sleeps.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • Mamdani hires author of defund the police bible

    Mamdani hires author of defund the police bible

    Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has debuted the transition team intended to prepare New York City Hall for its 111th mayor. The team is filled with the types of leftie loonies expected from Mamdani: a trans, anti-zionist rabbi from Brooklyn as well as a gun-control advocate dubiously associated with Nation of Islam-founder Louis Farrakhan. And then there’s Alex Vitale – a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College whose views on policing are not only disproven, they’re downright dangerous.

    Vitale is one of a handful of transition team members tasked with overseeing community safety issues. Public safety, policing and crime reduction have become flashpoints for the new Mayor, who established his political career promising to end law enforcement as we know it. Time after time, Mamdani has committed to “abolishing the police” – a phrase that gained nationwide traction following the death of Eric Garner and the #BlackLivesMatter-led race-reckoning back in 2020.

    In June, Mamdani walked back much of his “defund” rhetoric following a mass office shooting in Midtown Manhattan. “I am not defunding the police; I am not running to defund the police,” Mamdani told reporters at the time. “I’ve been very clear about my view of public safety and the critical role that the police have in creating that public safety.”

    Enter Professor Vitale.

    If there is any doubt Mayor-elect Mamdani remains committed to defunding the police it’s his choice of Vitale for his transition team’s 26-member Committee on Community Safety. Vitale literally wrote the book on the topic, The End of Policing, back in 2017. “The bestselling bible of the movement to defund the police, in an updated edition,” is how Vitale’s publisher describes the book on its homepage. “The problem is policing itself,” writes Vitale in the book itself.

    Mamdani-watchers had been hopeful that his previous anti-law enforcement policies would be blunted by his decision to retain high-profile, tough-on-crime Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch. But the selection of Vitale this week suggests that New York may be picking up, where “defund” disasters in other big cities left off. And the New Yorkers Mamdani campaigned as most championing – the poor, and black and brown – will be hit hardest if the Mamdani-administration embraces the anti-law and order policies he’s espoused for years.

    Look no further than Minneapolis, where Garner was killed by police in June 2020, to witness the failure of defund-the-police firsthand. Even before Garner’s death, progressive city activists had been working hard to reduce law enforcement. As the New York Times reported, activists confronted Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey at his home during the height of the post-Garner riots and demanded “We don’t want people with guns toting around in our community.”

    But people “toting guns” is what Minneapolis got as city officials became mired in appeasing the local activist class. Shooting victims surged by 90 percent in the year following Floyd’s death, as arrests dropped by a third. The following year, shootings rose by 101 percent – with some 83 percent of the victims (and 89 percent of the shooters) African-American, according to City of Minneapolis data.

    Similar stats were tallied in other “pro-defund” cities including Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Portland, according to a 2002 report by the Heritage Foundation.

    This vision of the future has already arrived in New York City – and Mamdani has yet to take office. Like in Minneapolis, the vast majority of violent crime in New York is committed by ethnic minorities against ethnic minorities in just a handful of crime-ridden neighborhoods. In 2022, for instance, black New Yorkers constituted 74 percent of all NYC shooting victims, despite comprising just 24 percent of the city’s population. By 2023, black New Yorkers were 18 times more likely to die from gun violence than their white counterparts, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

    Although violent crime rates have declined to record levels under current Mayor Eric Adams and Commissioner Tisch, minority communities remain outliers. Last year blacks and Hispanics comprised nearly 90 percent of shooting victims citywide, with virtually all of the shooters black and Hispanic. Meanwhile, the NYPD — which is nearly 65 percent non-white — has lost over 15,000 police officers over the past five years, and hundreds more continue to depart monthly.

    What’s most telling about the “defund” debate has been the number of minority community leaders vocally opposed to it. As early as August 2020 – just two months after BLM protests clogged city streets – high-profile black and Latino officials were blasting plans to cut $1 billion in NYPD funding. Same in Minneapolis and Philadelphia and most big cities decimated by gun violence. Most crucially, the majority of big city residents never wanted their police departments defunded, either. In fact, one year after Garner’s death, the percentage of Americans seeking an increase in police funding actually rose by 16 percent.

    With the Mamdani inauguration still more than a month away, it’s too soon to gauge whether he will fulfill his long-held belief in trading seasoned police officers for a new-fangled “Department of Community Safety” filled with social workers to tackle many public safety issues. But either way, the appointment of Vitale to his transition team suggests Mamdani has yet to fully step-back from his long-held anti-policing views. Should he not, violent crime and gun deaths will be the inevitable consequences – with white New Yorkers like Professor Vitale mostly insulated from the carnage.

  • Will the Supreme Court force Trump to repay tariffs?

    Will the Supreme Court force Trump to repay tariffs?

    The most important thing to know about the Trump administration’s defense of its hotly contested use of tariffs to bring allies and opponents to heel is not that it is a novel and unprecedented legal argument but rather a full-throated articulation of the campaign themes that got the president elected – in both 2016 and 2000.

    In its legal documents, and in the oral arguments that took place before the Supreme Court Wednesday, the Trump administration paints a picture of America under siege.

    Once thriving industrial towns in the Midwest hollowed out. Factories dismantled as supply chains have been moved offshore. Hostile foreign nations flooding the US with drugs and once productive workers turning to opioids and alcohol for solace as opportunities slip away.

    If there is such a thing as a populist legal argument, the Trump administration is making it in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. And as if to up the stakes, the administration is predicting an economic catastrophe if the court moves to curtail Trump’s ability to impose tariffs without congressional signoff.

    “The President… has determined (tariffs) are necessary to rectify America’s country-killing trade deficits and to stem the flood of fentanyl and other lethal drugs across our borders,” the administration argues in court papers. “With tariffs, we are a rich nation; without tariffs, we are a poor nation.”

    Indeed, the President has placed so much emphasis on the outcome of the case that he suggested for a short time that he might attend Wednesday’s hearing before backing off the idea.

    What is most striking about Trump’s tariff regime, and his assumption that Congress grants the president broad authority to bypass a complex regulatory framework that has been in place largely undisturbed for decades is the underlying modus operandi.

    Trump would likely never articulate it this way but his style in imposing tariffs is of a piece with much else he has undertaken – the shakeup of government agencies through DoGE, his unorthodox execution of foreign policy and his wholesale remaking of the Republican party. Move fast and break things, as they say in Silicon Valley.

    Whether his claim that the president has unfettered authority to impose tariffs will win the day wasn’t entirely clear from the colloquy between the justices and US Solicitor General John Sauer who made the argument for the administration. Both conservative and liberal justices peppered Sauer with questions that focused on the administration’s assertion Congress had delegated tariff making authority to the president in times of national emergency.

    They seemed skeptical that Congress had ceded that power, but later in the hearing conservatives Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett posed equally sharp questions of Neal Katyal, a former US solicitor general representing businesses suing to overturn the tariffs. Kavanaugh seemed concerned that blocking the president from unilaterally imposing tariffs on foreign made goods would conflict with the power granted the president under Article II of the Constitution to conduct foreign policy.

    It would be logically inconsistent for the law to grant the president the power to impose trade embargoes, as it apparently does, while barring the president from imposing tariffs, Kavanaugh speculated.

    Barrett appeared receptive to the administration’s argument that unwinding the president’s tariff regime would require the United States to refund hundreds of billions in projected proceeds. Such an outcome would create a “mess,” she said.

    The court typically issues its opinions in June and July, at the end of its term. But it agreed to hear the tariffs case on an expedited basis and it is possible, perhaps even likely, that a decision will be issued sooner.

    Through much of the nation’s history, Congress jealously guarded its power under Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution to “collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises” but began to cede some of that authority to the president early in the 20th century. While that has enabled the president to impose new tariffs and raise and lower existing duties, the president’s authority has at the same time been constrained by a latticework of regulatory agency requirements and foreign treaties.

    The issue before the court is whether the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, enacted in 1977, delegates tariff making authority to the president, permitting him to bypass existing controls. The law grants the president the power to “investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any… importation or exportation of… any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.”

    Presidents have typically used the law to impose financial sanctions on foreign governments and individuals, including asset seizures, but no president other than Trump has cited it as a basis for imposing tariffs. And nowhere in the text of the statute is the word tariff used.

    At the hearing, liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan made much of this fact, but so too did conservative Neil Gorsuch, one of the court’s conservative majority. If the president could leverage his foreign policy authority into imposing tariffs, without congressional consent, there would be little for Congress to do in that arena.

    “Could the President impose a 50-percent tariff on gas-powered cars and auto parts to deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat from abroad of climate change,” Gorsuch asked.

    Citing the fentanyl epidemic, Trump imposed steep tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China in January and February, blaming them for the flow of synthetic opioids into the US. In April, he imposed a second set of tariffs on all US trading partners, arguing that mounting U.S. trade deficits had created a national emergency while from time to time suspending some duties as US officials negotiated with their foreign counterparts.

    At the outset, Trump’s imposition of sweeping tariffs triggered concerns that the higher cost of foreign made goods would trigger a new round of inflation.

    But so far, the impact has been subdued. Importers, still apparently rolling in lush post pandemic profit margins, have been absorbing at least a portion of the difference. Meantime, Trump’s negotiated sale of soybeans and other agricultural goods to China may blunt the impact on agricultural imports and assuage American farmers. Moreover, the tariffs have had a huge impact on the US Treasury receipts. So far, the government has collected nearly $100 billion and estimates for a full year range as high as $750 billion if the tariffs remain in place.

    But it isn’t just about revenue and economic clout. At bottom, the case centers on a fundamental theme of governance in the United States. Where does congressional authority end and where does the president’s begin and to what extent can the president’s foreign policy portfolio override the House and the Senate? It is a question that has animated American jurisprudence and politics from the beginning. Often there are powerful arguments on both sides and finding the right balance can be excruciatingly difficult.

  • Is DEI to blame for the Louvre heist?

    Is DEI to blame for the Louvre heist?

    Police in Paris have arrested two men after the “heist of the century” at the Louvre museum. According to the French press, the pair were arrested separately as they prepared to leave the country on Saturday evening; both are in their 30s and from Seine-Saint-Denis, the sprawling suburb north of Paris. As yet there is no indication that police have recovered any of the crown jewels that were stolen from the museum in seven sensational minutes last Sunday. The search for them and the two other gang members goes on.

    The 88 million euros ($102m) heist has been deeply embarrassing for France, and the fact that those responsible appear to be local villains as opposed to the international criminal masterminds that some had suggested will only further redden the Republic’s face.

    Jordan Bardella, the right-hand man of Marine Le Pen, called the robbery a “national humiliation”, as did Marion Marechal, the niece of Le Pen and a former MP in her National Rally party

    Marechal demanded that the Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars, and the head of security, Dominique Buffin, be relieved of their duties. Marechal claimed they had been appointed to their positions as “part of a policy to promote women… at the cost of sacrificing competence and jeopardizing our nation’s cultural heritage.”

    There was much fanfare when Buffin was named last year as the first woman to head up the Louvre’s security. Profiling Buffin, the left-wing Le Monde claimed that she was sometimes mistaken by visitors for a gallery attendant as she went about her work in the museum. Tourists apparently couldn’t conceive that a woman was in charge of security with a staff of 1,100 under her command.

    Laurence des Cars was appointed to her post in 2021, the first woman in the 230-year history of the Louvre. Her competency has come under scrutiny this week. It was reported in the press that des Cars has invested five times less money in security than was the case between 2006 and 2008. On the other hand she has splashed out nearly half a million euros on a new dining room.

    Des Cars offered to resign in the wake of the heist but this was refused by the government. This is no surprise. Emmanuel Macron handpicked des Cars for the post of director and he has to stick by her or else his judgement might be called into question.

    Macron has been a fervent supporter of DEI, or what is known in France as the “feminization” of society. Upon his election as president of the Republic in 2017 he appointed Florence Parly the minister of the armed forces. A socialist and career civil servant, Parly had no military background.

    In March 2022, a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, France’s top brass warned that they had enough ammunition for four days of high intensity combat. Parly left her post a few weeks later without much to show for her five years in office other than the “feminization” of the military.

    In 2019 Parly launched an initiative to increase the number of women in the armed forces and she boasted that she would “double the proportion of women among generals by 2025”.
    Her zeal encountered resistance among several senior military figures, who criticized her “political impatience”. In 2020 Parly blocked the publication of a promotion list because she was unhappy at the number of women on it.

    France’s civil service has also been subjected to similar social engineering. In 2023 a law was passed that increased the quota for female appointments to senior and executive positions from 40 percent to 50 percent. As of 2027 there will be financial penalties for non-compliance.

    This quota also applies, from January 2026, for appointments to ministerial cabinets and the cabinet of the President of the Republic.

    Earlier this week a collective called Women of the Interior bemoaned the fact in their view there aren’t enough women employed in France’s Ministry of the Interior. They also regretted that female police numbers have slightly decreased.

    Policing is not much fun in France, what with violence from Islamists, Antifa, anarchists, rioters and radical environmentalists. In 2023, there were 5,492 police officers injured in the line of duty, an average of 15 a day. Perhaps that is why numbers are down.

    France’s “feminization” has been inspired by America’s DEI, but while the Trump administration has started dismantling the dogma, France is doubling down. There was a furious response earlier this year when the US Embassy in Paris sent letters to companies requesting they drop DEI programs.

    The Ministry of Foreign Trade denounced the letters as “US interference” and proclaimed that France “will defend their companies, their consumers, but also their values”.

    One wonders if France can defend its companies better than it can its crown jewels.

  • Will SCOTUS strip seats from Democrats?

    Will SCOTUS strip seats from Democrats?

    The headwinds facing Democrats in Congress have been blowing powerfully for some time now. On culture, the economy, law enforcement and immigration the party is on the defensive as it casts about not only for a winning message, but leaders able to persuade the public the party remains relevant in the age of Trump.

    Add to that list of hurdles the Supreme Court.

    The court’s conservative majority has delivered one blow after another to treasured progressive causes including transgender rights, maintaining the federal workforce and presidential authority. Now the court is contemplating changes to the Voting Rights Act that could, if carried out, cause Democrats to lose a dozen or more seats in the House, all of them held by minorities.

    Further losses for House Democrats couldn’t come at a less opportune time. While the Republican House majority is razor thin, Democrats have yet to hit on a theme that could plausibly drive a campaign to take back control. Off year elections typically favor the party out of power, but with opinion polls showing historically low ratings for Democrats nationally, the picture is bleak.

    That is why the case before the Supreme Court is so problematic for Democrats. During oral arguments Oct. 15, Republican appointed justices seemed to suggest they were open to restricting and perhaps even ending a provision of the Voting Rights Act that permits state legislatures to consider race when drawing up congressional districts. It’s not at all clear that the court, if it decides to strike down or dramatically change the law, will issue a ruling in time for next year’s congressional elections, though the possibility cannot be ruled out.

    Most of the vulnerable districts are in the south. Were the court to curtail the act, some 30 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus, might lose their seats.

    The case, Louisiana v. Phillip Callais, centers on a redistricting battle in Louisiana following the 2020 census. Population changes forced the state Legislature to redraw the state’s seven congressional districts to ensure that the state’s voters were evenly distributed among them. A group of black voters challenged the plan, arguing that by creating only one black majority district, the state had intentionally discriminated against African American voters, who composed one third of the state’s residents.

    A federal district court judge agreed and in response, Republican leaders preemptively came up with a new plan that created a second black majority district while at the same time protecting the seats of House Speaker Mike Johnson and majority leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans.
    Deploying a dash of Constitutional finesse, the Republican authors of the new map declared that even though they had created the state’s second black majority district, the primary goal was not to redress a racial injustice, but rather to insure the Republicans’ advantage in the upcoming congressional elections. In the abstruse and often murky precincts of Constitutional law, the Republican map drawers seemed to be creating a defense against a line of attack that they had impermissibly used race in their redistricting plan.

    It didn’t work. A group of white voters sued, alleging the map breached the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment by engaging in racial stereotyping to design the district, and they asked the court to throw out the redistricting plan.

    During oral arguments, the court’s conservative justices appeared open to the idea of restricting or perhaps even overturning section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which in broad terms restrains state legislatures from engaging in the practice of racial gerrymandering, or intentionally distributing minority voters among multiple districts in a way that leaves them short of a majority.

    Over time, the Supreme Court has interpreted the law to mean that state legislatures may consider race among a number of other factors, including incumbent protection and geographic consistency, so long as the purpose of the plan is to remedy past discrimination.

    Justice Brett Kavanaugh queried Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who argued in favor of keeping the second black majority district, on whether section 2 ought to be time limited in some way. The implication of course was that maybe the time had come to end the practice.

    “As you know… this court’s cases in a variety of contexts have said that race-based remedies are permissible for a period of time, sometimes for a long period of time, decades in some cases, but that they should not be indefinite and should have an end point,” Kavanaugh said. “And what exactly do you think the end point should be or how would we know for the intentional use of race to create district.”

    Later in the hearing, Justice Neil Gorsuch pointedly asked whether creating a black majority district would require that a state intentionally discriminate on the basis of race by excluding white voters.

    At another point, Justice Samuel Alito seemed to imply that apportioning white or black voters from one district to another might not have anything to do with racial stereotyping but rather the result of partisan politics, since in many jurisdictions whites overwhelmingly vote Republican while blacks vote largely for Democratic candidates.

    Under those circumstances, what might look like racial stereotyping instead is simply one party or another seeking to pack a district with their voters.

    “If it happens to be that people of one race or another race overwhelmingly prefer one of the political parties, does that transform the situation into racial voting, or is that just partisan voting?” Alito asked.

    Gerrymandering, the practice of creating congressional districts to capture certain voting blocks and gain partisan advantage, dates back to former Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry, an early master of the art. In 1814, Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, signed off on a redistricting plan with a state legislative district so misshapen that critics said it resembled a salamander. It wasn’t long after that “gerrymandering” entered the political lexicon.

    The Supreme Court has periodically weighed in on the practice, usually giving great deference to state legislature. In the 2019 case Rucho v. Common Cause, it even declared that there was no role for federal courts in restricting or controlling most gerrymandering disputes, since it was fundamentally a political function and a prerogative of state legislatures.

    The court, however, has from time to time stepped into redistricting disputes that involve racial discrimination and that are brought under the Voting Rights Act. After the 2020 Census, when South Carolina state legislators redrew the boundary lines of Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace’s coastal district and removed about 30,000 black voters to make it more reliably Republican, the court upheld the new map saying the challengers had not proven that race was a predominant factor.

    The Supreme Court agreed that the redesigned district’s purpose was to maximize Republican votes, not exclude blacks.

    Earlier, in a 2013 opinion, chief justice John Roberts, wrote the court’s majority opinion overturning section 5 of the voting rights act, which required certain states with a history of discriminatory behavior to get preapproval from the Justice Department for changes to voting procedures.

    Each decision marked an incremental change, but the overall effect has been to ratchet back judicial oversight of elections. If the Supreme Court curtails or eliminates section 2 of the voting rights act, the effect will be to further diminish the federal role.


  • Did the mafia make NBA stars offers they couldn’t refuse?

    Did the mafia make NBA stars offers they couldn’t refuse?

    The FBI has arrested Chauncey Billups, NBA champion, Hall of Famer, and coach of the Portland Trail Blazers for his association in a rigged poker game operated by some of New York City’s most notorious crime family. “Why would Chauncey do it?” the world of sports is asking. He’s already worth tens of millions of dollars. That’s a question for Billups, his attorneys, his God, and, presumably, Blazers ownership to answer. But as someone who regularly plays a lot of low and micro-stakes poker, I have a pretty good idea.

    The games I play in are monitored by security cameras, with armed guards at the exits in case people get out of line. When I play in World Series of Poker or World Poker Tour events, there are a strict set of rules by which the vast majority of players abide. There’s some rule-bending, but it usually involves peeking at other people’s cards, using computer solvers to help make quick decisions at the table, or a variety of “angle shooting” tricks upon which the poker world tends to frown. In the rare instances when actual cheating does occur, with the occasional earbud installed to allow a player who know what’s happening on the internet livestream in which they’re participating, the poker world roots it out pretty quickly, and that player quickly finds themselves uninvited, in legal trouble and having to actually work for a living instead of playing cards.

    Chauncey Billups, on the other hand, fell prey to the sinister temptations of the “private game,” which is where all poker pros know the real money lies. The Bonanno, Genovese, Lucchese and Gambino crime families paid Billups, as well as two Miami Heat players, Terry Rozier and Damon Jones, to participate in New York games that involved rigged card shufflers and special glasses and contact lenses. Rozier also apparently faked an injury to throw games, or at least manipulate NBA stats, winning thousands of dollars in sports betting as a result.

    So the NBA is at least partially rigged, big surprise, but let’s keep our eyes on the cards. As the New York Post put it, the mob used the NBA stars to attract “fish” to the games. However, these weren’t mere fish. I play against fish on the average Thursday night as they pull crumpled $20 bills out of their wallets in a desperate attempt to beat a game they can only occasionally win. These were bonafide whales.

    It might seem odd for people to risk playing a private game, run by the mob, when the bright and mostly regulated lights of Atlantic City casino poker are just 80 miles away. But poker is a tempting devil. The idea that you can turn $100 into $2,000 isn’t just an abstraction. It’s a reality, and it happens in card rooms around the world every day. Blowing thousands of dollars at a time also happens regularly. So whales don’t even necessarily know that they’re whales. They’re just swimming in the ocean.

    And the temptation of playing with actual professional basketball players, who we’ve seen on TV and probably gambled on before, is pretty high. In the skeezy world that makes up my days and nights, guys get pretty excited if they play against someone who was once a AAA pitching coach for the Red Sox, or a backup point guard for Michigan State for a couple of seasons. Imagine playing against Mr. Big Shot himself from the Pistons. You’d never suspect that he’s actually a bald, black Le Schiffre.

    “The fraud is mind-boggling,” said FBI director Kash Patel at a press conference yesterday. Yet when I heard about it this morning, it didn’t quite boggle my mind. If you play poker, you just assume that kind of stuff is going on at private games, at all stakes, all the time. I, for one, would be very wary of playing in a game run by someone named “Flappy” who’s backed by the Gambino crime family.

    There’s no real mystery that the mob would run a shady card game. That’s nothing new. Or that rich marks would fall for their schemes. The real question revolves around Billups, who risked his shining reputation and his substantial fortune to help criminals cheat at cards. We can only assume that the mob made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  • Trump inherited a weaponized justice system

    Trump inherited a weaponized justice system

    Has Donald Trump “weaponized” the justice system to go after his political enemies? The answer is no.

    “What about former FBI director James Comey?” you ask. “What about New York Attorney General Letitia James?” Both went after Trump hammer and tongs. Now both have been indicted by the Trump Justice Department. Are those not textbook cases of “weaponization,” of “retribution,” of using the power of the system to punish people who have punished you?

    Hold on. I write this in mid-October. By the time you read it, I suspect that the list of indictments will be much longer. Candidates for inclusion on this Ko-Ko-like “little list” include John Bolton, national security advisor during Trump’s first term; Jack Smith, the special counsel who managed to rack up 37 indictments against Trump in two criminal cases; and sundry other former intelligence officers and DoJ officials. The dragnet will be large; it will be relentless.

    So haven’t I just admitted that Trump weaponized the justice system?

    No. Trump didn’t weaponize the justice system. He inherited a weaponized justice system.

    More on that shortly. First, here’s another little list. Peter Navarro, Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Jeffrey Clark and George Papadopoulos.

    That’s a very incomplete roster of Trump aides and supporters who were indicted, prosecuted, disbarred and/or jailed. The list does not include the more than 1,200 people convicted over the January 6 protest at the Capitol. Nor does it capture a contrast that Navarro describes in a post on X: “I was dragged through Reagan Airport in leg irons, mug shot, handcuffs, jail cell, the full circus. Meanwhile, Comey faces felonies up to 10 years for the worst political conspiracy in modern history, and he slips quietly through a side door.”

    Responding to demands that Comey be subjected to the humiliation of a “perp walk,” Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel said there would be “no drama.” But the FBI that Trump inherited specialized in such drama. Remember their guns-drawn, dawn raid to arrest his confidant Roger Stone? The tipped-off media were there in force to lap up and regurgitate the entertainment.

    That’s one element of the system Trump inherited. Another has to do with the courts. Trump and his allies faced kangaroo courts, kangaroo juries and a kangaroo media. All are Democrat specialties. There are certainly places in the US where judges, or at least juries, favor Conservatives. But is there any analogue to Manhattan or Washington, DC, where the name “Trump” guarantees conviction and hectoring media obloquy?

    There is not. The cases that Letitia James and Alvin Bragg brought against Trump in New York were patently ridiculous. But had the President not won re-election he would be facing a $500 million fine, the destruction of his business empire and decades in jail, all to a hallelujah chorus of media self-congratulation.

    At the moment, that media has shifted into a minor key, not crowing but spewing threnodies about “selective prosecution,” “lawfare,” “retribution” and of course “weaponization.” Yet Trump could never deploy the sort of judicial and media vendetta that had been organized against him. Republicans lack the kangaroos.

    In March, I wrote here about deterrence, not as a feature of military strategy but as a part of political wisdom more generally. The attack on Trump and his allies, I noted, was only incidentally directed at those individuals. Writ large, it was aimed at undermining the very things they claimed to be supporting: “our democracy” and the rule of law. From that perspective, I said:

    The Trump administration’s efforts to restore fiscal sanity, accountability, and common sense to the workings of government will seem like retaliation or retribution only to those who have betrayed those values. For them, the closure of redundant or malevolent agencies, the exposure of financial wrongdoing and incompetence, the revocation of tolerance for illegal migrants who prey on US citizens will seem simply punitive. It is punitive, because it is in response to egregious wrongdoing. But in the long term, such masculine policies will function less as a punitive expedient than as a deterrent.

    The press is full of caterwauling headlines about Trump’s “vindictive,” “weaponized” prosecutions. But if you step back, such imprecations ring hollow. For one thing, as the commentator “Cynical Publius” noted: “James charged Trump with nonsense; Trump charged James with a verifiable crime.” The same is true of Comey. The same will be true of the rogues’ gallery of anti-Trumpists destined for the courts.

    After she got done running for office on a platform of suing Trump and calling him “illegitimate,” James dusted off her oratory. “When powerful people cheat to get better loans,” she intoned, “it comes at the expense of hardworking people. Everyday Americans cannot lie to a bank to get a mortgage, and if they did, our government would throw the book at them. There simply cannot be different rules for different people.”

    That was before it was revealed that James lied to a bank to get a lower interest rate on a mortgage.

    Here is the moral of the story. Deterrence works only because there lurks in the background a credible threat of retaliation. Before Trump, Republicans were too lily-livered to mount any such threat. Would it be better if an incoming administration did not set about indicting its predecessors? Yes. Which is why the President’s vigorous effort to call to account those who waged lawfare against him is a necessary purgative. If vigorously pursued, it may just reset the conventions and courtesies of our political life.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • John Bolton’s AOL chat with Iran

    John Bolton’s AOL chat with Iran

    “John Bolton Surrenders To Federal Authorities” is a headline I could have only dreamed of seeing 20 years ago, but this morning it came true. Following yesterday’s grand-jury indictment of Bolton, the former Trump National Security Advisor and W. Bush Iraq War architect/manipulator gave himself up and pled not guilty in federal court on charges of mishandling classified information. But if Bolton isn’t guilty, I’m a high-stakes poker professional.

    The charges claimed that Bolton was “unlawfully hoarding” documents, that he sent classified information over grandpa communication medium AOL instant Messenger in 2018 and that he shared more than 1,000 pages of notes, while working on a memoir, with his wife and daughter, neither of whom had security clearances. “From on or about April 9, 2018, through on or about September 15, 2019, on a regular basis, Bolton sent diary-like entries to [his wife and daughter] that contained information classified up to the Top Secret/SCI level,” says the indictment.

    Now, let’s be clear, even though we can dream, this isn’t Julius and Ethel Rosenberg or Aldrich Ames-like stuff. Bolton was just trying to enjoy a final cashing-in on a lifelong career of neoconservative warmongering. But Iranian hackers, representatives of a government that wouldn’t mind targeting Trump, not to mention Bolton, also have access to AOL. According to the indictment, they intercepted the messages. Looks like the man with the walrus mustache got a little careless with his “secret travel memos.”

    Bolton said, in a statement, “These charges are not just about [Trump’s] focus on me or my diaries, but his intensive effort to intimidate his opponents, to ensure that he alone determines what is said about his conduct,” Bolton said. “Dissent and disagreement are foundational to America’s constitutional system, and vitally important to our freedom. I look forward to the fight to defend my lawful conduct and to expose his abuse of power.”

    It’s true that Bolton has had some unkind things to say about Trump since leaving his political orbit, and it’s also true that Trump is using any means necessary to target his political enemies, real or perceived. But unlike James Comey and Letitia James, Trump’s other two most powerful recent lawfare targets, Bolton’s indictment actually has a chance to stick. He almost certainly won’t serve a full 10-year sentence, but the grand jury indictment is quite specific and pointed. The law tends to be biased against a guy who’s “hoarding strategic government communications” for his memoir.

    Let’s keep in mind that Bolton was a key architect of one of the biggest government deceptions of our time, or any time, the absolute insistence of the George W. Bush administration that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which led to one of the most pointless wars in American history. Talking to NPR in 2023, a sure sign that the political winds had shifted, Bolton said, “it depends on how you define a lie, because if you believe that’s a lie, then a lot of what I hear on NPR on any given day is a lie. To me, a lie is a statement that’s untrue, that’s uttered deliberately knowing it’s false. The administration didn’t lie.”

    Sure, John. In my mind, Bolton’s indictment is about yellowcake uranium, not about saying mean things about Donald Trump in a memoir called The Room Where It Happened. But you can only go to war with the army you have. John Bolton as the ultimate defender of free speech, dissent and disagreement feels like a bit much to me. Next thing you know, Democrats will be trying to rehabilitate the reputation of the Cheney family. Truth be told, it’s kind of hard to believe.

  • Is conversion therapy free speech?

    Is conversion therapy free speech?

    Kaley Chiles is a Christian therapist who places the Bible at the center of her practice.

    To many of her patients, religious faith is often more important than Freud. They see Bible readings, prayer and a focus on spirituality along with traditional principles of psychotherapy as essential elements of any treatment plan. 

    While outside the mainstream of psychoanalytic practice, Chiles’s technique combining traditional psychotherapy with Biblical precepts for years had been deemed non-controversial, if confined to more conservative regions of the country. But that all began to change in 2019 when the state of Colorado enacted legislation banning so-called conversion therapy for minors, a technique that aims to help gays change their sexual orientation. 

    Fearing the law would interfere with her treatment of teenage clients wrestling with their sexuality, Chiles filed suit in federal court against Colorado alleging the statute violated her First Amendment free speech rights. She lost at the trial level and in the initial round of appeals, with jurists finding that Colorado’s ban fell well within its right to regulate medical practice and protect patient safety.  

    But it now appears the US Supreme Court is leaning toward upholding Chiles’s right to advise young clients that changing their sexual orientation is a viable and realistic option, despite widespread medical and scientific agreement that such techniques rarely, if ever, work. 

    In oral arguments on October 7, the state’s conservative majority peppered both sides with questions suggesting they were leaning in Chiles’s favor. A decision upholding Chiles’s appeal would follow a string of Supreme Court rulings in recent years favoring religious conservatives while creating new hurdles for gays and transgenders. 

    Without First Amendment protections, “states can transform counselors into mouthpieces for the government,” argued James Campbell, a lawyer for Chiles, at the Supreme Court hearing. 

    The case poses novel Constitutional questions that center on ability of medical professionals to communicate with patients about treatments they believe are effective but that have been outlawed by state regulators.  

    On a deeper level, though, Chiles’s lawsuit and the legal battle surrounding it are simply the latest fight in the nation’s long running conflict over cultural values, ranging from gay and transgender rights to abortions and race relations. 

    In June, the court’s 6-3 conservative majority ruled in favor upheld a Tennessee ban on the use of puberty blockers and hormones for the treatment of young patients suffering from so-called gender dysphoria and seeking to change their gender identity. In another ruling this year, the court also upheld, on a temporary basis at least, the Trump administration’s ban on LGBTQ persons serving in the military while the litigation continues 

    And in a 2018 decision that may well have a bearing on Chiles’s appeal, the court found in favor of religious conservatives by striking down a California law requiring anti-abortion groups to provide information on state funded abortion and contraception when counseling their clients. The court found that the law infringed on anti-abortion groups’ free speech rights.   

    Reflecting the heated politics underlying the Chiles case, dozens of interest groups from both sides of the ideological spectrum have filed amicus briefs with the court. Medical societies of various stripes have been particularly scornful of Chiles’s case. One brief filed by the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association and other organizations representing health care professionals maintained that conversion therapy rarely if ever works. It argued at the same time that the practice causes great harm to patients by further confusing them about their identity and disrupting family relations while raising the risk of suicide. 

    Conversion therapy embraces a wide range of techniques, some bordering on barbaric, including aversion therapies using electroshock treatment and nausea inducing drugs. Some 30 states have banned it. 

    Chiles and her lawyers say she would employ none of those practices and that she engages only in talk therapy. But in court filings and in interviews, they stop short of describing exactly what Chiles would tell clients seeking to change their sexual orientation, only that she might advise them on how not to act out unwanted sexual impulses.  

    “When she engages in those conversations, she’s encouraging them to achieve their goals,” Campbell said during oral arguments. “She’s discussing concepts of identity and behavior and attractions and how they fit together.”

    This is an ongoing active dialogue where she’s helping them explore their goals, and that absolutely has to be protected by the First Amendment.” 

    The state of Colorado of course sees it differently. 

    “No one has ever suggested that a doctor has the First Amendment right to offer the wrong advice,” countered Shannon Stevenson, Colorado solicitor general. “The law applies only to treatments, that is, only when a licensed professional is delivering clinical care to an individual patient. In that setting, providers have a duty to act in their patients’ best interests.” 

    During the October 7 oral arguments, the court’s conservative justices seemed supportive of Chiles’s free-speech claims. Justice Samuel Alito for one opined that because Colorado law bans discussion of conversion therapy but permits therapists to advise clients on transitioning from one gender to another, the law had clearly crossed a First Amendment red line. 

    “That looks like blatant viewpoint discrimination,” Alito declared. 

    Justice Amy Coney Barrett queried Campbell on whether clients who felt they had been harmed by conversion therapy might be able to file a malpractice claim. It was a loaded question in the sense that proponents of Colorado law argue conversion therapy is harmful and that a First Amendment protection for therapists would leave patients defenseless. 

    Bryant’s question implied that civil litigation against irresponsible therapists might serve as a brake against harmful practices. 

    Chiles’s legal team, Alliance Defending Freedom, a prominent Christian legal organization that has participated in over 70 Supreme Court cases, has packaged their client in a way that aims not only to persuade jurists but also the public at large. That is hugely important in the world of civil litigation. Having a sympathetic client is often just as pivotal as a powerful claim or even a particularly effective legal team. All the legal firepower in the world won’t help if juries and judges are put off by the claimant. 

    On its website, Chiles, who is based in Colorado Springs, is depicted in a video hiking in the Rockies near Denver while she talks on an audio track about her clients and how Colorado’s conversion therapy ban had frustrated their efforts to regain emotional health. 

    “They say that emotions are like children. It’s not OK to let them drive the car and it is not OK to stuff them in the trunk,” she says in the video. “I counsel my clients on… how to make their lives more fulfilling, satisfying and more in line with who God created them to be. What I am struggling with right now is that the state of Colorado has decided to impose their own values, not only on me but more importantly on my minor clients.” 

    It’s a well-articulated rationale by a seemingly credible plaintiff. It’s just not altogether clear, from the science at least, that her clients would benefit.

  • Why did the FBI spy on Republican Senators?

    Why did the FBI spy on Republican Senators?

    The United States Senate Judiciary Committee this week revealed that Joe Biden’s FBI spied on eight Republican Senators and a Republican House of Representative Member in 2023. The underlying FBI record reveals the agency sought telephone tolling data as part of the Arctic Frost investigation that Special Counsel Jack Smith used to concoct an election fraud case against President Donald J. Trump. Although the indictment was ultimately dismissed when the President was re-elected in 2024, Smith expended the resources of the federal government for two years investigating the President in search of a federal crime.

    The data revealed the telephone numbers the elected officials called, the dates of the calls and the duration of the calls made by Senator Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), Senator Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Senator Bill Hagerty (Tennessee), Senator Josh Hawley (Missouri), Senator Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Senator Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Senator Dan Sullivan (Alaska), Senator Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) and Representative Mike Kelly (Pennsylvania) in the wake of the 2020 election.

    Senator Chuck Grassley commented, “Based on the evidence to-date, Arctic Frost and related weaponization by federal law enforcement under Biden was arguably worse than Watergate.”

    More than egregiously unjust, the latest revelation shows just how deep the rot penetrated during the Biden years. During its long and occasionally ignoble history, the FBI has spied on everyone from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Elvis Presley, but tracking the communications of sitting United States Senators might be a new low.

    Smith’s indictment charged the President with obstructing the election certification process on January 6, 2021, a process in which the aforenoted Senators were actively involved under a process governed by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. All Republicans, all MAGA and all Trump supporters, none of the Senators was previously known to have been targeted by law enforcement. One can only surmise Smith was contemplating an indictment in which those Senators, and perhaps others, would have been charged as conspiratorial co-defendants along with President Trump.

    It is difficult to envision a world in which Joe Biden, his Attorney General and his FBI Director were unaware of these escapades by Bureau agents. It is more baffling still to fathom how any of those longtime public officials could possibly think the eventual eruption of the FBI’s insidious investigations would cause anything less than a counter-revolution, which is precisely what we are seeing unfold at this moment. Thus, the predicate evidence for procuring something as serious as a citizen’s telephone records should have been substantial. At this moment, no purported justification has been disclosed, let alone substantiated.

    The FBI has some difficult questions to answer, and forthwith. Just what was the agency fishing for in 2021, and why? Who authorized the requests for the tolling data? How far up the chain of command at the FBI, DOJ and White House did the knowledge, authorization and directives go? What was the basis for targeting these individual Senators and Representatives? What particular crime in the federal criminal code did the FBI think the people’s duly elected representatives had committed to justify such a gross invasion of their privacy? Significantly, did the agency learn anything from its failed scorched earth campaign against President Trump and his allies? If so, what is the FBI doing to ensure abuses of this nature are not repeated?

    FBI Director Kash Patel, whose plate is already full, needs to empower a massive clean up crew to repair the institutional damage done by his predecessors. The Senate should, and the President will, fully support him as he gets to the bottom of how it all went so wrong.