The untold story mothers the lie.
Ursula K. Le Guin, Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994).
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Ursula K. Le Guin
Author: Redactor
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Dominican Independence
February 26 marks the Dominican Republic’s Independence Day.
Things looked bad recently for Leland Dudek, an employee of the Social Security Administration.
Dudek almost got fired for helping the DOGE team understand how SSA’s systems work so that DOGE could zero in on wasteful or fraudulent payments.
On social media, Dudek wrote: “At 4:30pm EST, my boss called me to tell me I had been placed on administrative leave pending an Investigation. They want to fire me for cooperating with DOGE . . .
“I confess. I helped DOGE understand SSA. I mailed myself publicly accessible documents and explained them to DOGE. . . . I moved contractor money around to add data science resources to my anti-fraud team. . . . I asked where the fat was and is in our contracts so we can make the right tough choices.”
An investigation? Administrative leave? For helping, as an executive-branch employee, the head of the executive branch to find and extirpate waste and fraud? SSA managers may have been confused about whether Donald Trump really is the president.
The suspense didn’t last long.
Dudek was not fired. Instead, the SSA commissioner was fired and Dudek became acting commissioner.
“There are many good civil servants,” says Senator Mike Lee, “who have been quietly frustrated for years with politically motivated mismanagement [and] who possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the problems with their agencies. Put them in charge, hand them scalpels and flamethrowers.”
Could we have at long last found the cure for dimwitted obstructionism? A certain reality TV star had words for it: “You’re fired!”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Joanna Russ
The trouble with men is that they have limited minds. That’s the trouble with women, too.
Joanna Russ, Existence (1975).
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Senator Revels
On February 25, 1870, the first African-American entered Congress to serve in the U. S. Senate.
Hiram Rhodes Revels (Sep 27, 1827 – Jan 16, 1901) was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, a Republican politician, and college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. Revels (pictured above) was elected as the first African American to serve in the United States Senate, and was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. He represented Mississippi in the Senate in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era.
The President of the United States clashed with the governor of Maine over transgender participation in government-organized athletics. Quite a hoot.
Behind this fracas looms the legacy of . . . Richard M. Nixon.
First, the fracas: “In a tense exchange with Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, President Donald Trump threatened to strip Maine of its federal funding,” explains CNN, “if the state refuses to comply with his executive order banning transgender women from competing in women’s sports.”
The brief volley of promises (threats) between the governor and the president made other governors “uncomfortable.” Yes, that’s a news story.
“Is Maine here?” he wondered aloud. “The governor of Maine?”
“Yeah,” Gov. Janet Mills answered from across the room. “I’m here.”
And then came a testy political exchange, the kind you don’t often see, culminating in this from Trump: “You better comply, you better comply, because, otherwise, you’re not getting any federal funding.”
“See you in court,” she promised.
“Good; I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”
Trump may not be wrong. He may have the better
But doesn’t it seem weird that the president of the United States can extort compliance from the states on matters that are not enumerated in the Constitution?
Well, back in his first term Trump signed an executive order to direct a new devolution process of turning back education to the states. But the transgender issue is a big deal, and most Americans (around 80 percent) are against “biological” “men” competing with girls and women in sports, and since much of sports in America takes place in state-directed/taxpayer-funded contexts, Trump is leveraging federal bloc grants against states that balk at his agenda.
Thank Nixon and his “New Federalism.” While an attempt to give power back to the states, it also tied federal money to the devolution, which has effectively turned states into welfare queens begging big bucks off Washington, severely compromising the states’ . . . basic competence.
It’s this policy that Trump should be fighting.
But that would make governors even more uncomfortable.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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E. M. Forster
Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.
E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910), chapter 22.
On February 24, 1803, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, established the principle of judicial review. William Marbury (pictured) was a businessman appointed as a “midnight judge” by lame duck president John Adams. He became the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison.
On February 24, 1917, United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter Hines Page, was shown the intercepted Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany offered to give the American Southwest back to Mexico were Mexico to declare war on the United States.
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Trump Is Not the Law
Though Paul Jacob has defended Donald Trump’s attacks upon the bureaucracy and Elon Musk’s DOGE operation, as well as found a silver lining to the president’s protectionism, the reader of Common Sense can be assured that not everything the president says or does is cheered at ThisIsCommonSense.org.
Take the new administration’s rhetoric that “we are the federal law.”
That was in response to Maine’s Democratic governor’s objection to the Trump administration’s tying federal education funding to that states with the states’ compliance with the new policy prohibiting boys and men from participating in girls’ and women’s sports even if they call themselves women and “identify” as women.
The administration is not the law. Executive powers are limited constitutionally, and if it attempts to merely dictate policy without congressional legislation, the new administration will be breaking the law, effectively going rogue.
Of course, one way or another every administration does this on some issue, and the problem of an imperial presidency is a major concern. And has been. Since the time of Andrew Jackson!
But in this case, the Maine governor may have no legal leg to stand on in objecting to the new policy — for the policy appears to be based on existing law. Elon Musk re-tweeted this post by Sarah Parshall Perry in response:
Maine will lose in court. Title 9 protects biological women, period. In order to get $250 million in federal funding, Maine entered into a contract with the Department of Education, promising to follow that federal civil rights law. Her reliance on contrary state law will prove fatal to any continued recalcitrance.
But Mr. Musk is nevertheless prone to the kind of loose talk that the president is. Here is a quotation of Musk, courtesy of Fox News:
Mr. Musk provides us with an argument that falls apart in at least two major points:
- The president is not the representative of the people. He is the executive of the general government. Big difference.
- The test of a democracy is not that “the people’s will” is implemented, at least not if that will is figured to be any given policy determined by voting. One election doesn’t give any voting bloc carte blanche to do any thing it wants. Majorities have limitations, minorities still have rights, and a system of checks and balances and state limitations circumscribes what all participants do in a democracy.
Trump and Musk both talk as if they have some sort of mandate to break the law, or embody the law. But even good things, like reducing government power, must be done in the right way.
But talk about action isn’t action as such, and each act in government should be judged on its constitutional merit.
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Michael Flores
Socialist states like North Korea, China, Vietnam, Cuba and others consider feminism to be petit bourgeois and as a consequence give women few roles in life- mother or whore. For example, red light areas in Vietnam the left claimed during the war were there because of GI’s being there, have grown to incredible miles of streets. Cuba has all ages prostitution to make up for the lack of upward mobility for women in society. Once you go socialist, women are the first losers. So why would women in any society want socialism?
Because like “fascist,” they make up their own meaning of what socialist is.
Michael Flores, “Trump’s Populist Moment,” Substack: Civil and Global Defense (February 15, 2025).