Quinta Jurecic
speaker
199 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Quinta Jurecic’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Now, it is true that many of these spending authorizations have particular provisions saying, you know, the executive has this level of discretion in how to distribute these funds in such and such a way. And so...
Part of the problem with looking at this OMB spending freeze is that so much spending was frozen that it's actually really difficult to figure out if they had gone, you know, item by item, whether they might have been able to kind of turn off the switches or redirect funding in a way that could arguably have been legal. But because they just did it all at once,
It's, I would say, not only illegal, but an active threat to the constitutional order. And this also, again, goes back to this question of compliance with court orders, because as you say, there have now been multiple court orders saying you need to stop this spending freeze, you need to turn the money back on. And yet there have also been a lot of reports saying, you know...
various organizations that were getting this money have not actually received it despite assurances that they would. I think I saw a report that Head Start programs in a lot of states have not been receiving their funding, for example.
Two points. First off, I think that the fact that Elon Musk is playing an increasingly large role going around and trying to cut costs in a maximally chaotic and destructive way at all of these agencies really undermines that argument.
Because if you take the view that, you know, unelected bureaucrats are not under the control of the president, should not have this authority, how do you deal with Elon Musk? Nobody elected him. It's not even clear what role he has.
So I don't want to get us on too far of a detour here. Taking this argument seriously, a lot of the arguments that the conservative legal movement, for example, has made about the importance of centralizing control focus on the role of the appointments clause and the importance of having a Senate-confirmed official.
Under the Appointments Clause, you can then serve at the pleasure of the president. Elon Musk has not been nominated or confirmed to any position. And so I do think that even if you take this sort of view that it's very important to have a unitary executive who can, you know, act with energy and carry out his will, because of course it's going to be he, that...
Musk does not fit within that constitutional vision because he is functionally an unaccountable private citizen who has kind of been bolted on. And the people who he has working for him are in the same category. And so I actually do think, I mean, if you look at some of the polling, for example, on Republican approval of Musk playing a significant role in U.S.
government, it has gone down dramatically since the beginning of this administration. Yeah. If your argument is we have a serious problem with unelected bureaucrats, that Musk actually is a serious fly in that ointment. So that's one thing. But the other thing I would say is that, you know, walking out the front door and jumping out a fourth floor window are both ways to leave a building, right?
And if what you want to say is we need to have greater executive control of, you know, unitary executive control of the government, we want to limit the power of unelected bureaucrats, so on and so forth. If you were saying that in good faith, I don't think that this is the way that you would carry out that project. Right.
Because what you have seen now is just wholesale destruction in a way that is going to be very, very hard to build back. And you could have made an argument for, you know, slimming down these agencies, having more political employees, increasing the president's ability to fire individuals leading these agencies at will in a way that did not need to involve this kind of smash and grab effort.
So then you say, is this an example of an administration that, you know, comes in, wants to push a, let's say, kindly, extremely aggressive, I think unkindly and perhaps more accurately, extra-constitutional vision of executive authority, and sort of comes out swinging and says, we're going to cut off all this money, you know, Come see us in court.
The court's going to give us an order and we're going to disobey it and we're going to kind of push forward in that way. Or is it an example of total carelessness and total incompetence? And I think the answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
There are reasons to think certainly that this administration has been motivated in a lot of its actions, particularly in the OMB actions, by this kind of extra constitutional vision of executive authority.
But it is also true that if you were, you know, an evil genius and you wanted to pursue that vision in such a way that would kind of get the courts on your side, this is not how you would have done that.
Well, I don't want to sound too confident because I was also confident that they would not give Trump the time of day on the immunity issue. And wow, was I wrong about that. So I do think that I want to speak with a certain level of humility here that the way that I at least understand the court has really changed since the immunity decision, frankly. Yeah.
My metric at this point for whether Trump can get something through the court is, and I'm going to say this and it's going to sound flippant, but I really do mean it sincerely, whether or not John Roberts thinks that somebody has been rude.
And what I mean by that is that in the first Trump administration, there were a number of things that the administration tried to get through that the Roberts Court barred, including the DACA rescission, for example, the effort to add a citizenship question to the census. These are examples where the court kind of looked at them and said, like, come on, you've got to do better than that.
At least, for the love of God, give us some kind of an administrative record here. Don't just show up and say, I did this because I wanted to. I think that what happened in the immunity decision was in part that Trump's offenses were farther in the rearview mirror.
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