Dorf on Law

Today's entry in my "Wait, Can He Actually Do That?" series differs from the usual fare in three ways.  (1) It doesn't include that rhetorical question in the title. The title instead poses a different question: "Is House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Proposal to Eliminate Federal Judgeships Constitutional?" (2) The "He" in "Wait, Can He Actually Do That?" today refers to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, not to President Donald Trump. Indeed, because the question concerns the power of Congress, perhaps today's entry should refer to "They," not "He." (3) Today's entry does not appear here on the blog but instead in my latest Verdict column, available here . I have nonetheless decided to include it in the series and give it a number (12) because the proposal is of a piece with other moves by Trump and his allies to violate longstanding norms and very likely also to violate the Constitution.

We are only a few weeks into the second Trump presidency, and it is already quite clear that the confluence of interests that has put the Silicon Valley Ideology in the White House is rapidly—and chaotically—dismantling the political, economic, legal, and social institutions and structures that have held this country together as a democratic republic. Our failure to recognize and take seriously the Silicon Valley Ideology has led us to this moment, and things will only get worse if we continue to ignore or, even worse, decide to accept it as our nation’s new guiding philosophy. In 1997, as a great wave of technological optimism was beginning to crest, Langdon Winner was invited to share his thoughts on our bright tech future at the Computer Ethics: Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Conference, hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery and held at Erasmus Universiteit in Rotterdam. Winner, a political theorist known for his critical studies of science, technology, and culture, was p...

As reported over the weekend in The Chronicle of Higher Education , University of Pennsylvania President J. Larry Jameson reached an agreement with Education Secretary Linda McMahon that would restore the $175 million in funding the Trump administration withheld on the ground that Penn was not excluding transgender female athletes from women's sports . Jameson has agreed "in principle" to rename the institution the University of Trumpsylvania. Trump then posted on Truth Social :  I AM HONORED THAT THE WARTHON SCHOOL, WHICH I GRADAUTED FROM AND IS THE BEAST IN THE WORLD, IS GOING TO BE PART OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TRUMPSYLVANIA. THE FEDERRAL $$$ WILL NOW START FOWLING TO THIS GREAT COLLAGE. Renaming the university founded by Benjamin Franklin to restore "only" $175 million in federal funds might seem like a bad deal for the University Formerly Known As Penn (UFKAP). After all, Penn renamed its medical school  upon receiving $225 million in 2011. Adjusted for inflati...