Judges v. Musk

Weekend reads for Feb 8, 2025

Happy Saturday, readers.

Overnight, the Musk coup ran into serious legal pushback. The federal judiciary froze Elon Musk’s USAID purge, as well as cracked down on Musk’s access to Treasury Department core systems and data.

This builds on earlier legal pushback to the birthright citizenship gambit and the attempted “buyout” purge of federal workers.

That initial sense of being undefended that so many felt — well, it’s not gone, but it finally feels like some defending is going on.

Governors like J.D. Pritzker have stepped up to lead, and more and more Congressional Democrats have caught onto the notion that they need to be seen confronting the takeover of the institutions. And, most importantly, millions of Americans have been acting, protesting, and calling their representatives, keeping up the pressure to fight for their rights, as they were elected to do.

But before we get into the weekend’s reads — essays on how to move forward even now, an in-depth analysis of the heist Elon Musk’s teams are trying to pull off as they get high-level access to the nation’s checkbook, a reflection on the courage it takes to remember, and more — we’ve noticed that many of you have mentioned you’ve been having trouble keeping up, or finding time to reflect, so we hope you’ll find some inspiration here. We’ve found some resources that might help — archives that preserve the information the White House is so busy trying to erase, and trackers that may help you visualize the scale of the effort to push back.

The New York Times has started tracking all of the administration’s moves against American institutions, while Just Security has been doing the same for the litigation opposing those changes. Jessica Valenti has been archiving CDC recommendations that have been scrubbed from the agency’s site, and the Chronicle has been keeping up with changes to education policy. The End-of-Term Web Archive is useful every time there’s a transfer of power — and it’s particularly valuable this time.

We won’t kid you. It’s a long road ahead and the administration’s assaults on democracy continue. But there are limits. Congress is being reminded they exist, and so is the White House. And so are the people.

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In case you missed it

We spent a lot of time at The Ink recently digging into the whys and hows behind unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s coup attempt — an administrative power grab by a private citizen without precedent in American history.

Focus on the coup

USAID fought apartheid. Musk is killing it

What Elon Musk really wants

And let us state clearly: The Ink will not back down from calling a coup a coup, or from any of the hard truths the moment demands. Your support allows us to do this work, independent of billionaires and their whims. And to make it easier to join us, sign up for a new subscription this weekend and get 20 percent off, forever.

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Readings

Making progress, even now

As is often the case, I think the political commentator Josh Marshall has sage advice. Our job is not to stop what Trump is doing, because we can’t. For the moment, he has the power he needs, though Congressional Democrats can find some small fingerholds—the need to extend the country’s debt ceiling, for instance—and use them to exact concessions. Our basic job is to make what he’s doing is deeply unpopular, because that will stiffen the backbone of the courts and any remaining moderate Republicans, and set us up for possible gains if and when we next have elections. So: witness, communicate, ridicule, amplify strong voices. [The Crucial Years, Part I; Part II]