Matthew Stiegler

Trump Has Been Sued 198 Times for Withholding Funding. It Hasn’t Stopped Him. (Gift Article) Immigration demands for highway dollars, D.E.I. rules for homeless grants: how Trump has tried to wield spending to get his way.

We've been tracking nearly 200 lawsuits against the Trump administration over its attempts to leverage federal funding to impose the president's agenda.

The most startling pattern: The administration seems entirely undeterred when it loses in court.
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Early support for Bush’s Iraq invasion was over 70%.

Trump Tariff

Judges Refund

Didn’t

Both deeply conservative.

The car salesman fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and for the rest of *his* life he woke up with screaming nightmares about the goddamn Germans coming over the hill.

One a mail carrier, the other a car salesman.

In his youth, the mail carrier once went to a tryout the Phillies held at Connie Mack Stadium for pitchers, and for the rest of his life the family called him “Cy,” for Cy Young.

"But when the same mistakes happen over and over again - the picture can start to look different," he wrote. "What looks like inadvertence (when it happens once) might begin to inch closer to looking intentional (when it happens more than once a week)." Farbiarz's opinion orders an extraordinary remedy for prosecutors in all of the judge's immigration-habeas cases - those in which a detained immigration challenges their detention - where Farbiarz issues a no-transfer order. Prosecutors will be required to sign a declaration, under penalty of perjury, that they have received the injunction, conveyed it to ICE, and provided ICE with written legal advice on the agency's obligation to comply with the order. And ICE will be required to sign a second declaration confirming it received the injunction and has received written legal advice from prosecutors on its obligation to comply with the order. "Requiring declarations is intrusive. But it is a narrowly-tailored way to address the precise problem before the Court - of ensuring going-forward compliance with judicial no-transfer orders," Farbiarz wrote.

New Jersey federal judge Michael Farbiarz has threatened criminal contempt against ICE and ordered a very unusual remedy as an intermediate step: requiring both DOJ and ICE to certify receipt of his orders under oath newjerseymonitor.com/2026/03/03/j...

Only Fetterman.

It’s quite a signal, for sure

The great torpedo scandal, 1941-43 - War History Mark 14 torpedo’s side view and interior mechanisms, published in “Torpedoes Mark 14 and 23 Types, OP 635”, March 24, 1945

There’s a fascinating rabbit hole you can down for the dawn of this technology.

warhistory.org/@msw/article...

Trump Has Been Sued 198 Times for Withholding Funding. It Hasn’t Stopped Him. (Gift Article) Immigration demands for highway dollars, D.E.I. rules for homeless grants: how Trump has tried to wield spending to get his way.

An important piece showing that losses in court haven’t stopped Trump from seizing Congress’s spending power and targeting dissenters and “blue states.”

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

*kids’

A wonderful book that’s within arm’s reach whenever I’m trying to do real writing.

Like it so much I gave my kid the kid’s edition.

Reprimanded for having a staffer impersonate her at a hearing, and publicly admonished for acting in cases where she’d recused. Oof.

"You are the secretary of DHS -- for now," says Balint. "You think you're immune from accountability. But I promise you this: one day, he is not going to be president anymore."

"When that day comes, we will still be here... and in hearings like this, we are going to continue to prove your guilt." 🔥

Saying “war” makes them feel tougher and manlier, and, when it comes down to it, they care about that feeling more than they care about being caught violating any law.

Love this: “Instead of Googling Epstein, Aaronson, then 29, turned to what he considered an even more reliable source: his mother... ‘Be careful not to get sucked up in the slime-machine going on here,’ she wrote back, adding, ‘Since you don’t care that much about money, they can’t buy you.’”

Ah. Thanks!

... whether it means what I say it means or not. Like, if a statute says "cherries," then it definitely applies to regular cherries, and maybe it applies to fake sundae cherries, but the fact that it might apply to the latter also doesn't make it ambiguous as to the former. I'd argue same here.

I find plausible your point that the "and in the same manner" language might have the effect of preventing a state from applying its rules one way against other lawyers and in a different, harsher way against government lawyers. But, to me, whether the text means that *too* doesn't answer ...

some *found

Anyhow, I appreciate the civil exchange.

I have a terrible new idea, if I'm ever a judge (which I shan't be) I'm going to tell the lawyers to go hash out the key issues on bluesky, because this seemed quite illuminating. Not least because I suspect some either position more convincing in the end.

... in other forms under the statutory text. My position is simply that the text forecloses DOJ from saying states can't investigate disciplinary issues against DOJ lawyers until DOJ says so, bc it says govt attorneys are subject to state disciplinary rules in the same manner as other attorneys.

I agree with you to the extent you're saying there are sound policy reasons why you'd want DOJ to have some ability to prevent a bad-faith state actor from interfering with their work. Based on the past, based on readily envisionable what-ifs. And maybe I'd agree that flexibility survives ...

And also I think that interpretation would read "in the same manner" out of the statute, no?

But that doesn't seem coherent to me. The law says they're subject to the same rules in the same manner. The rules don't just say "a lawyer can do this, can't do this," the rules also define the process, how investigation happens. So to me the text forecloses DOJ asserting it gets to enforce instead

Conversely, a statute that says in effect, "DOJ must do X, but the only ones who get to decide if DOJ did X is DOJ" would (a) be a strange law, and (b) one I'd expect to be worded differently than this was.

I hear you. I imagine that'd be argued if this gets litigated. To me, the plain meaning of that provision is along the lines of, "if you've got any rules to the contrary, you better change them and the AG is the one who better do it."

Peter talks about that in the post of his I linked above.