Fair enough, I see where you’re coming from. Personally I’d want to see documents or journal confirmations before calling it outright censorship, but I agree the political track record makes it hard to dismiss the reports.
Fair enough, I see where you’re coming from. Personally I’d want to see documents or journal confirmations before calling it outright censorship, but I agree the political track record makes it hard to dismiss the reports.
Indeed, totally losing the benefit of the doubt when it comes to matters of censorship and lying, is one consequences of being the administration historically most infamous for censorship and lying. Normally that is motivation enough for people to choose not to become infamous for censorship and lying.
If any evidentiary memos or documents are due, they are due from the administration (with credible independent verification, of course), since at the moment the whistleblowers are more credible based on their assertions alone, and so their claim currently prevails.
The Federal courts have reached this point too. There’s a “presumption of regularity” where the government has historically been seen as a mostly truthful arbiter that would make good faith efforts to follow court orders.
So when a judge would ask, “Do you plan to deport these people tonight?” to a government lawyer, if the lawyer replied, “No”, the court wouldn’t intervene because government lawyers obviously wouldn’t just lie to a judge presiding over a lawsuit. Well it turns out that they’re continually lying and being rewarded for it (Emil Bove for one). So courts are now suspending that presumption and ordering explicit actions with strict timelines for updates for basically the first time in modern history.
It’s astonishing at how little regard this administration has for the norms and structures that make up our government and how much damage they’re doing to the rule of law.
https://www.justsecurity.org/120547/presumption-regularity-t...
One of the worst instances of this was when the government lawyers essentially replied "We thought only the written orders count" when asked why they didn't comply. I'm not a lawyer, but from the reactions of actual lawyers this is not how it works in court, at all.
Cato - one of the few actually principled right-leaning think tanks have written extensively about this (and other instances of Trump administration contempt). It’s just as bad as you’ve described and infuriating for anyone who actually values the rule of law.
https://www.cato.org/commentary/carousel-contempt
Courts rarely punish agencies for contempt and trust erodes, but shame no longer works and two cases aren’t proof of a systemic collapse.
Those ‘two cases’ were from the first months of this term - needless to say there have been many further cases since then. And more to the ‘systemic collapse’ point, Appeals Courts staffed by Trump-appointed flunkies are gutting the contempt proceedings and the Supreme Court is refusing to step in..
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna223873
Fair, but linking more cases doesn’t automatically prove systemic collapse either. Appeals and the Supreme Court setting boundaries is still part of how separation of powers works, even if you dislike the outcomes. The deeper question is whether courts still have effective levers to enforce compliance, and right now contempt looks more symbolic than binding.