The Trump administration’s AI policy has been all over the map—from its initial “let ’er rip to win the AI race against China” posture to its declaration of war earlier this year against the frontier lab Anthropic. Now, Politico reports, the administration is about to drop a major AI executive order—one that could demand federal review of advanced AI models before they are released. More on that when it materializes. Happy Thursday.
Freedom’s Not Just Another Word
by William Kristol
There’s so much infuriating and dispiriting news to share—as we do every day. But precisely because the world seems to be getting more somber, more bleak, more dangerous, I feel duty bound to bring you inspiring news when I can. So I want to say a word about the Freedom House dinner I attended last night.
Freedom House is an organization dedicated to defending democracy and promoting human rights, to fighting for a world in which all are free. It was founded in late 1941 to counter the original America First movement and to support U.S. involvement in the fight against fascism. Over its eighty-five years, it has stood firm against Nazism and Communism and the many other variants of authoritarianism that have disfigured the global landscape. It has supported democracy, human rights, and dissidents fighting for freedom.
It was a bipartisan enterprise from its beginning. Its original chairmen were Wendell Willkie, who’d been the Republican presidential candidate in 1940, and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose husband had defeated Willkie in that contest. Among its other founders were prominent anti-fascists like the journalist Dorothy Thompson, whose 1941 essay “Who Goes Nazi?” has enjoyed a new burst of well-deserved attention of late, and Rex Stout, whose Nero Wolfe mysteries deserve their continued fame.
Last night’s dinner program honored courageous dissidents from authoritarian and totalitarian countries, with moving tributes to their courage and the causes for which they have fought. It also featured expressions of confidence in the ultimate success of those causes, despite the depressing trends of the last two decades of democratic backsliding, documented best by Freedom House’s annual reports.
But for me, the dinner was less about the program and more about reconnecting with men and women, from left and center and right, who have tried to fight, mostly arm-in-arm, sometimes arguing with each other, for freedom. I caught up with former staffers for John McCain and for Nancy Pelosi, with men and women who’d served in administrations from Reagan’s to Biden’s, with career diplomats and trouble-making activists from America and abroad.
Our current president was not much mentioned—but of course his non-freedom-loving shadow hovered over the dinner. One of yesterday’s leading foreign policy stories was Putin’s visit to China, following on Trump’s paying court to Xi Jinping last week. So the fact that freedom today has powerful enemies working against it was front and center in everyone’s mind. And the people with whom I spoke were clear-eyed about the moment in which we’re living and the challenges we face at home and abroad.
At one point last night I was commenting on how daunting some of those challenges seem. My interlocutor quite correctly pointed to the world of eighty-five years ago, when Freedom House was being founded. In May 1941, Great Britain stood alone. Nazi Germany was unchecked in continental Europe and still in alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Imperial Japan was dominant in East Asia. Our challenges pale by comparison.
But one thing the founders of Freedom House did have going for them was an American president who was on the side of freedom. That’s not the case today. But that hasn’t stopped the brave Ukrainians from holding their own without much help from us. It hasn’t deterred the people of Hungary from defeating Viktor Orbán contrary to the wishes of our government. It hasn’t stopped dissidents around the world like Jimmy Lai, unjustly imprisoned by Beijing and honored last night, from facing cruel persecution in order to stand for freedom.
Last night we heard references by several speakers to the fact that this is our 250th anniversary. We are, sadly, not now holding high the Declaration of Independence’s torch of freedom. But the fact that so many others around the world are inspired by its principles is an ironic but powerful confirmation of their universality. Perhaps it’s not the case that America is an indispensable nation. But it seems as clear now as ever that the principles of the American Revolution, of the Declaration, are indispensable principles. It was heartening to spend an evening with men and women who are committed to them.
AROUND THE BULWARK
The Last Full Measure, Quietly Remembered… A Memorial Day reflection from MARK HERTLING.
The Assault On Multiracial Democracy in the South… JUSTIN JONES joins TIM MILLER to talk about voting and elections in the South since the Supreme Court disemboweled the Voting Rights Act.
Trump Wants to Be . . . What?!… JVL and ANDREW EGGER break down why Trump said he wants Benjamin Netanyahu’s job.
An Ebola Survivor on the Ebola Outbreak… Dr. CRAIG SPENCER joins JONATHAN COHN to talk about the hemorrhagic fever epidemic in Central Africa.
Quick Hits
NO PUBLIC FUNDS FOR THE BALLROOM: Donald Trump still wants $1 billion in taxpayer money for “security improvements” to his East Wing ballroom plans, but it’s looking like he won’t get it. Senate Republicans quietly threw in the towel on squeezing the East Wing funds into their forthcoming immigration-spending reconciliation bill, with several GOP senators expressing deep skepticism over the line item and Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruling against its inclusion in the reconciliation bill at all. “We were told that the ballroom money is out,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters after the GOP’s regular conference lunch Tuesday.
The president won’t be thrilled. Just hours before, he had been publicly flogging Senate Majority Leader John Thune to go to total war with MacDonough: “Over the years, she has been brutal to Republicans, but not so to the Dumocrats—So why has she not been replaced? . . . The Dumocrats cheat, lie, and steal, especially when it comes to Votes in Elections, but stick together, whereas the Republicans allow the Elizabeth MacDonoughs of the World to stay in power, and brutalize us.” What a shame!
SUING THE SLUSH FUND: It’s not clear yet who will have standing to sue over Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund—but people are already giving it a try. Two police officers who defended the Capitol during the attack, former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and D.C. policeman Daniel Hodges, filed suit yesterday to block the creation of the fund, which they called “a slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.” Politico has more:
The lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington, argues that the fund violates the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on use of federal money to “pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”
The officers’ complaint also alleges that the Justice Department has no legal authority to create the fund, announced Monday as part of a settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed over the leak of his tax returns during his first term.
The Justice Department will likely argue that the officers don’t have standing to bring the suit. The complaint contends that Dunn and Hodges have faced ongoing harassment, including death threats, from participants in the riot. The officers allege that they have a personal stake in the dispute over the fund because it will be used to provide financial support that is likely to fuel that sort of harassment in the future.
Hodges was one of the indelible faces of the violence of the riot—the officer who was captured on video screaming in pain as the mob of rioters crushed him against a doorframe. Read the whole thing.
HOW WE GOT HERE: Amid all the (justified) complaining over Trump’s ridiculous abuse of the Judgment Fund this week, we shouldn’t ignore one crucial fact: Congress didn’t have to make it so easy for him. Although “very few people had given the Judgment Fund much thought until this week,” the New York Times notes, “legal experts had long warned that it was ripe for abuse”:
“The integrity of the Judgment Fund is dependent on the good faith of executive branch officers,” Paul F. Figley, a former Justice Department official who helped administer the fund from 1978 to 2006, wrote in 2015 in an article in The Journal of Constitutional Law. Its title was telling: “The Judgment Fund: America’s Deepest Pocket and Its Susceptibility to Executive Branch Misuse.”
“It serves a good purpose,” Mr. Figley said in an interview this week. “But it’s subject to manipulation.”
Professor Bagenstos, who served as the general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget and of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Biden administration, wrote in January about the danger posed by the Judgment Fund.
“An administration that wished to spend money on projects or beneficiaries not authorized by Congress,” he wrote, “could simply encourage its desired recipient to bring a lawsuit against the United States and then settle that lawsuit (no matter how frivolous) by making a payment from the Judgment Fund.”
Odds are we won’t be so lucky, but it sure would be nice if the aftermath of Trump 2.0 included a major reckoning with how much of our legal plumbing relies on “the good faith of executive branch officers,” and a serious attempt to change it—in a way we didn’t really get during the Trump interregnum. Read the whole thing.
Cheap Shots
No funds for the ballroom?!?!?!?!?!? Do none of these Senators care about National Security anymore?!?!?!?!?
/s
Speaking of taking heart, I'm not sure I should be too worried about the IRS agreement absolving Trump and his circle from ever being audited again. It's not a law passed by Congress, so it seems pretty likely that the next Democratic administration can just declare the agreement null and void over some technicality.
The whole thing will end up in court, sure - just about everything Trump touches ends up with his name as either a plaintiff or the defendant - but in the long run the IRS will return to treating the president and his cronies just like everyone else in the United States: that is, auditable and liable for penalties and back taxes.