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DC Events – Aug 18, 2025

Aug 18, 2025

DC Events and other Updates

You may wish to consider the following items in concert:

 

 

  • August 14, 2025 Slate column by Matt Watkins entitled, The Most Urgent Lesson for Democrats to Take From Trump’s D.C. Deployment.  The column concludes with the following paragraphs presenting a messaging and substantive challenge
    • That means Democrats cannot treat safety as a binary choice between “law and order” and “criminal justice reform.” Most people want both: protection from crime and protection from abuse by the state. They know true safety is as much about affordable housing, after-school programs, and mental health funding as it is about policing. Meeting them there requires starting with empathy, naming the shared priority, and then showing what is being done.
    • If they fail to do that, the same play will work in Chicago, New York, or anywhere else Trump decides to send troops. Each will be another proving ground. The lesson from D.C. is that creeping authoritarianism is not best countered by pointing at the water line and warning it is rising. It is countered by fixing the leak, by making the public so secure in their daily lives that they do not look to the strongman in the first place.

 

 

 

  • August 13, 2025 memorandum opinion by Judge Theodore D. Chuang  of the federal district of Maryland denying the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss a class action lawsuit filed by U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) employees against Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for dismantling USAID.

 

 

  • August 11, 2025 The 74 report by Linda Jacobson (before Judge Joun’s decision) entitled, Despite Court Order, Education Department’s Civil Rights Staff Still On Leave . The author explains that none of the laid-off Dept of Education employees had been rehired and the consequences of their absence, such as
    • “The people who turn to OCR are the students who feel really betrayed by their own institutions or by their own school districts and often feel like they’re at the end of the road,” said Amanda Walsh, deputy director of external affairs for the Victim Rights Law Center, a legal advocacy group that’s part the case. The Boston OCR office, one of seven shuttered in the downsizing, was handling complaints from the victims of sexual assault they represent. Now, Walsh said, they have no information on the status of those cases. “We’ve proactively reached out to OCR for updates and have received no responses.” 

 

  • August 15, 2025 Slate discussion between Mark Joseph Stern and Madiba Dennie entitled, One Judge Has a Clever New Way to Overcome the Supreme Court’s Trump-Fueled Chaos. The authors are referring to the above decision by Judge Joun, which concludes with the following two paragraphs by Ms. Dennie
    • I’ve written before about how SCOTUS’s shadow docket decisions make life so much harder for lower courts. It’s harder for them to do their job because, as you said, the justices are saying: Read our minds. Anticipate what we think. We think this precedent has been overturned, even though it hasn’t, so you shouldn’t follow it anymore. Here is Joun, essentially saying: Actually, this makes my life easier, because I’m going to assume that the Supreme Court didn’t change the law until it admits that it has. I think that is a brilliant way of flipping the burden. It makes sense to just tell the justices: I’m not gonna try to read your minds. I’m just going to do my job.
    • It brings to mind this concept of malicious compliance, where you’re technically doing what you’re supposed to, but in a way that actually thwarts the goals of the powers that be. It also reminds me of uncivil disobedience—getting in the way, but using perfectly lawful tools. I want to see more of it. Make every opportunity you can and make some more.