Judge invalidates Trump executive order, but Congress also cut off all funding.
A federal judge ruled that Trump’s executive order defunding NPR and PBS violated the First Amendment and issued a permanent injunction stating that executive branch agencies cannot enforce it.
The Trump order’s “instruction that all federal agencies stop funding NPR and PBS constitutes a penalty for engaging in speech disfavored by the President and cannot be lawfully implemented by any executive department or agency,” Judge Randolph Moss, an Obama appointee in US District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled yesterday.
The ruling against Trump in the case filed by NPR, PBS, and several stations may not have much practical impact. Trump’s May 2025 executive order was followed by Congress rescinding the entire Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) budget of $1.1 billion for fiscal years 2026 and 2027.
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Yeah. I wonder what the point of laws and the Constitution even is. President was never meant to have nearly this much power, and now not only do they have the power to break the law/constitution, there’s not any accountability after they do it. You could kind of make an argument that the president needs emergency powers (I’d usually disagree with it, but you could argue it) but there is simply no excuse for damage being done while breaking the law and then literally nothing is required to repair the damage.
The text of the constitution sort of assumes that Americans wouldn’t elect a person who cannot be trusted at all.
The people who wrote and signed the constitution, on the other hand, believed that people would try to seize personal power, and many even believed that George Washington would try to make himself king.
It’s more like the constitution was written by wealthy landowners for wealthy landowners, and the idea of the common people being able to hold the rich to account was downright undesirable, so it wasn’t encoded into law.
It’s also written by people in an agrarian culture so different than our culture today. The fact that it is still relevant at all is amazing. Like this is around the time germ theory was first proposed. Imagine if we still relied on a single document as the guiding principle for medicine established before germ theory was widely accepted.
There are faults with the founding fathers and their documents, but it amazes me how well the constitution has endured, not as an important document, but as a relevant document addressing issues we have today.
And, I’d venture a pretty good guess, if the founding fathers came back to today they’d be shocked that we’re still using their system (with a few modifications) and haven’t overthrown the government for something that suited the modern times.
Imagine if a democrat had ever decided the rules are for chumps and want bananas making all sorts of changes expecting no one to enforce anything. The White House would have been detonated from orbit.
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It’s also emblematic of the regime’s (very well known, at this point) modus operandi: do so much bullshit so fast and so constantly that the bureaucracy can’t keep up, and you end up getting what you want, despite not “winning”. It’s fait accompli.
It’s also important to fight a bunch of battles that don’t really matter to you. Trump does not give a flying fuck about PBS or the arts or wasting federal spending. He just knows his opponents do care, and will have to spend bandwidth fighting him on it. If and when he loses, he will use it to paint the picture of moderation, and insist things are unfair to him to lose every time.