Elon's DOGE Takes A Few Brushbacks, Plus

Elsewhere in aghast, plus a diversion, plus

Through the looking glass (credit Weldon Berger)

Elon takes a few brushbacks

Returning to a paraphrase of Andrew Jackson’s possibly apocryphal “they’ve made their ruling; now let them enforce it” remark about a Supreme Court outcome he disagreed with: several state attorneys general were in court this morning complaining to the judge who issued an injunction against the Chucky the Homicidal Dummy administration’s unconstitutional DOGE-inaugurated freeze on federal funds that at least some of the funds are still frozen.

Reuters reports that U.S. District Judge John McConnell said he was prepared to enforce his order. What Jackson was saying, if he said it, was “you and what army,” which is the issue here. Courts have lots of remedies at their disposal, but they all rely on the party with the army agreeing that the court has the authority to impose its will.

This is one of the first early tests of that agreement. The administration are saying that they’re not skirting the order; it’s just that turning the spigot back on is harder than turning it off. The judge isn’t likely to buy that.

Elsewhere in the Andrew Jackson space, Elon Musk’s young weevils have been instructed not to do anything illegal with the treasury department data they were given access to by newly installed treasury secretary Scott Bessent (who was speeded along the way to confirmation by 16 senate Democrats who assumed either that a billionaire is automatically qualified to run the department or that he might start donating to Democrats again.)

Chucky the Homicidal Dummy’s justice department say they’re not exactly sure what’s going on but they’re fine with the restrictions, which come well after one of the weevils* was reported to have obtained administrative credentials that would allow him to make changes in the payment systems. (That last story is paywalled at Wired but subscriptions are dirt cheap at the moment, like $5/year, and Wired is on fire.)

*That particular weevil, Marko Elez, has just resigned to spend more time with his fellow Nazis. From the Wall Street Journal:

A staffer for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency whose access to U.S. Treasury payment systems was approved by a federal judge on Thursday has links to a deleted social-media account that advocated for racism and eugenics.

The 25-year-old employee, Marko Elez, resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

The deleted profile associated with Elez, who was embedded in the Treasury Department to carry out efficiency measures, advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act and backed a “eugenic immigration policy” in the weeks before President Trump was inaugurated.

Man, “efficiency measures” pairs well with “eugenics,” don’t it? Elez was also a fan of genociding both Jews and Palestinians. One expects he’ll be back at one of Musk’s companies tomorrow. If he were older, he’d get a permanent job in the state department.

And that’s enough of that.

Elsewhere in aghast

The interim US attorney for D.C. and noted Elon Musk fanboi, Ed Martin, filed a motion to withdraw charges in a pending January 6 case against one of his own clients on January 21, the day after Chucky day and his first full day on his new job. Two weeks later he applied to withdraw as the attorney of record in the case. He forgot, see.

Ethics experts told Reuters that Martin’s participation in this motion violated the Justice Department’s conflict of interest rules, which require lawyers to recuse themselves from cases involving their former clients for at least a year.

John Sciortino, a former lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility told the outlet it represented “a violation of the conflict of interest rules, and the sort of thing OPR might investigate.”

That was in the before times, though.

The New York Times is finding new ways to frame Chucky’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza as a refreshing if heavy-handed negotiating tactic.

Proposing to commit multiple crimes against humanity could be seen as a pitfall equal to Hamas, in a lesser newspaper. The Israelis are down with it, though.

A diversion

Sometimes lost in all the furor about our brain-damaged, steroid-raddled, worm-addled, conspiracy-fetishist secretary-of-killing-everybody-to-be is his fondness for road kill. Expect the Health & Human Services headquarters to get a new food franchise soon.

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