Opinion
By Jeff Childers
2/21/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Thanks to an early court hearing, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is, your roundup has arrived early! Ta-da. The bad news is, it is a little shorter than normal. But today’s explosive content makes up for any absence of quantity. In the roundup: Trump’s legal juggernaut racks up another victory as federal worker lawsuits pile up like junk mail at the USPS; Democrat hysteria as Administration teases takeover of the Postal Service; Trump officially, in writing, declares war on the Deep State and grants vast new powers to DOGE to make it happen; Kash Patel, fresh off his confirmation as FBI Director, is ready to turn the Hoover Building into a deep state museum and start settling scores; Attorney General Pam Bondi teases a bombshell Epstein document release that has D.C.’s elite sweating buckets; and Victor Davis Hanson adopts C&C lingo to describe the state of the world.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Nobody knows for sure how many lawsuits have been filed against the Trump Administration’s efforts to reform the government, but it’s starting to look like someone is gunning for a new Guinness World Record. It’s a lot; this week, media —straining to keep track— suggested the national anti-Trump docket has blown past seventy lawsuits. Lest you despair, remember that, during the last four years, Trump fought off over a dozen civil and criminal cases— when he was just on his own. So. First up: yesterday, ticking one rare early victory in the “win” column, the UK Guardian ran a story headlined, “Trump administration can continue mass firings of federal workers, judge rules.”
To be sure, federal workers are having a moment, but it isn’t clear it’s going to be the moment they are hoping for. Yesterday, on the same day worker’s unions suffered a setback in the Guardian’s case in Washington DC, unions filed another lawsuit in San Francisco with similar arguments. It’s legal whack-a-mole, with progressive lawfare shops popping up faster than prairie dogs chattering at an errant falcon.
The Gazette reported yesterday’s newest lawsuit under the headline, “Labor groups sue Trump administration over mass firings of probationary employees.” I could swear they used that same exact headline for the Washington case, except it ran last week. But never mind.
In yesterday’s helpful decision in that same Washington case, Judge Cooper entered a 16-page order denying the unions’ TRO, ironically because they hadn’t completed the administrative appeals process: tangled in their own bureaucratic red tape. Judge Cooper wasn’t happy about it either. He got his licks in by derisively writing that Trump’s “onslaught of executive actions that have caused, some say by design, disruption and even chaos in widespread quarters of American society.”
Judge Cooper was correct that Trump intentionally disrupted the nation’s permanent bureaucracy. But the Trump Administration is not causing the chaos. The courts and the activists are causing the chaos. What emerges is a chaotic and bizarre Jackson Pollock painting of cases, parties, issues, and rulings, many overlapping, redundant, or inconsistent, every court taking a slightly different but maximalist approach to wielding authority over the Executive Branch of government decorated with sneering, unnecessary, progressive color commentary like Judge Cooper’s.
The situation practically begs the Supreme Court to weigh in, and soon, to keep the constantly threatened Constitutional crisis from becoming the country’s reality show. , For example, one long-pending legal question now begging for resolution is whether district courts can enter nationwide injunctions against the Executive, or whether that power is limited to the Supreme Court. It’s not at all clear which we should prefer; during the pandemic, for instance, we were extremely grateful for Texas judges who stopped the OSHA jab mandates.
🔥 But there’s an even uglier, more dystopian picture quietly emerging from all the fights over federal employment. It’s less like Jackson Pollock and more like The Scream. It’s a shameful picture of federal employment as a benefit. Federal workers have already been offered perquisites unavailable to we common folks, like Trump’s buyout offer, which would have paid low-performing workers to quit and enjoy almost a year’s salary and benefits while they gently transitioned to a new job amidst vacationing.
Private sector workers will never be offered a deal like that. Eight months’ severance is nearly unheard of outside the C-suite.
Protesting federal workers are acting more like angry activists than employees grateful to have a stable job. They clutch their entitled federal paychecks like toddlers grabbing a second juice box. Just look at corporate media’s delighted photos of progressive protestors. Civil servants treat their federal jobs less like service and more like some kind of civil right.
“Worker’s rights are human rights,” said one of the many identical, high-production-value, pre-printed signs at a recent rally. What does that even mean? It’s kind of like tweeting for sympathy over a horrible tragedy because their iced soy latte was made with almond milk and Starbucks forgot the extra whipped cream.
To be honest, I resent federal workers’ sense of entitlement to some of the most highly paid, highly benefited, and in many cases, easiest jobs in the country. Their tantrums, lawsuits, and antics are just making it worse and more obvious. I think a lot of people are starting to resent their arrogant, entitled attitudes. We shall see.
🔥 Another issue winging toward the nation’s highest court is the “unitary theory” showdown over whether Trump can fire federal workers on his payroll even if Congress passed a law saying he can’t. On Wednesday, USA Today ran a story headlined, “Judge halts Trump’s effort to fire Democrat from government workplace board.”
In this case, another DC district judge, Judge Rudolph Contreras (Obama, 2012), temporarily ordered the Trump Administration to reinstate a fired Merit Systems Protection Board member. Those board members are protected by a law that Congress passed limiting the President to removing them only for good cause, not at-will.
USA Today noted that the case “will likely test the scope of the president’s powers over those agencies.” Michael Kator, a lawyer for the fired board member, told AP, “This is, of course, only the first step in a series of battles that almost certainly will culminate in the Supreme Court.”
Testing that law and getting to the Supreme Court is, I believe, exactly the President’s goal.
The Merit Systems Protection Board is not just any random board. The Merit Systems Protection Board isn’t just any random office—it’s the bureaucratic nerve center Judge Cooper alluded to, the gatekeeping body where unionized employees must first air their grievances before suing. And make no mistake—Trump’s team knows exactly how critical this chokepoint is.
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Ronald Reagan famously advised, “when you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.” Yesterday, Trump didn’t just turn up the heat—he cranked it up to solar flare. Yesterday, the long march back through the institutions progressed at warp speed. The Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined, “Trump Is Planning to Take Control of the Postal Service, Officials Say.” Far from being bogged down in all the lawfare, the President’s team continues boldly advancing into new territory where no President has gone before.
You may not know this, but the 250-year-old Postal Service is referred to as a “quasigovernmental” agency, whatever that means. As far as I can tell, it means that we pretend that the USPS is supposed to run like a business, but actually hemorrhages money faster than that girl in The Omen who projectile vomits blood. Profits never happen, but Congress keeps clucking its tongue and ruefully approving billions more dollars while the USPS keeps moving fewer and fewer ballots, I mean mail, and hiring more and more people.
In 2024, the Journal reported the USPS lost $9.4 billion dollars. In one year.
According to leakers, President Trump is preparing to issue an executive order, possibly this week, to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and put the agency under the direct control of the Commerce Department. Democrats tried to cue outrage, but there’s a lot going on this week. Representative Don Beyer (D-Va.) squealed, “Nobody voted for this. It is brazenly illegal, unconstitutional and corrupt.”
But that was just the latest of the Swamp’s problems. They were typing up their latest lawsuits when a new executive order dropped and they spilled their Vente mochas into the keyboard. The USPS takeover was nothing. Yesterday, President Trump made things much, much worse.
🔥 Yesterday, Politico reported another Trump masterstroke in a story headlined, “Trump executive order requires sweeping review of federal regulations.” Wait till you hear about this one. It’s about to replace the 4-D chessboard with a new 5-D one.
The newest executive order is titled, “Ensuring Lawful Governance and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Regulatory Initiative.” They had no idea this was coming. It stacked on several previous EOs and relies on last year’s terrific Supreme Court decisions about agency powers. We will need to peek inside it to find all the presents.
First, the order began with the shot-heard-round-the-Swamp. The war on the Deep State has entered its public phase. Trump’s forces fired on Fort Sumter. It was an open declaration of war:
Boom. “It is the policy of my Administration … to commence the deconstruction of the overbearing and burdensome administrative state.”
The “overbearing and burdensome administrative state?” That’s a synonym for the Swamp, the Deep State. Trump is commencing its deconstruction.
Section two begins the order. “Agency heads shall, in coordination with their DOGE Team Leads and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, initiate a process to review all regulations … for consistency with law and Administration policy.”
They are going to review all the regulations. All of them.
During that comprehensive review, seven categories of regulations must be identified for the chopping block. I couldn’t pick a favorite example, so here they all are:
In the meantime, Agency heads are ordered to “de-prioritize enforcement” of any regulations that exceed constitutional or statutory authority —based on the Supreme Court’s latest trimming of agency authority— or that do not comply with Administration policy.
If the progressive left thought it already had its hands full firefighting employment lawsuits, that was nothing. This order lights fires all over the national regulatory landscape.
The implications are staggering. The regulatory state is vast, far bigger even than actual laws passed by Congress, which is saying a lot. I’ve suggested before in C&C that if Trump really wanted to kick off an economic renaissance in this country, he should prune a lot of regulation that stifles innovation and small business development.
I was thinking way too small.
He’s going to prune the whole thing.
And he put DOGE in charge. Forget Elon Musk. DOGE is just another name for an existing agency —the repurposed Digital Services Agency, whose charter is increasing efficiency— and which reports directly to the White House. In other words, Trump has a monitoring team in every important government agency watching like hawks to ensure the order gets carried out.
This order just made DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts look like a local comedian putting on a warmup act while the band was running late. Now the band has taken the stage to a sold-out arena. Regular readers know that I wondered whether the whole cost-cutting binge, welcome as it was, was just a distraction or decoy while the DOGE team gathered data. But for what?
This order is the political equivalent of the Moon falling out of orbit and smashing into the Earth.
Suddenly the Golden Age looks a lot less like a typical oversold campaign promise and more like a potential reality. There is no way to estimate the potentially explosive effect cutting massive red tape could produce for the economy, technological innovation, and small business creation. It’s potentially infinite.
And politically? It’s another masterstroke. Every single person outside government is going to be thinking hard about how de-regulation could affect their industry and their prospects. Democrats will be forced to defend the indefensible regulatory behemoth. It will unwind decades of governmental picking of winners and losers.
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As if the Swamp didn’t have enough fires to put out, CNN casually lobbed a Molotov cocktail with this headline: “Senate confirms Kash Patel as Trump’s FBI director.” Boom again.
You’d think the left would be popping champagne—after all, Patel is the FBI’s first Indian-American director. He checks every diversity box. He’s intersectional, practically a walking DEI poster.
Patel isn’t just another Trump ally—he’s the guy who helped pull the curtain back on the Russiagate hoax. To the Swamp, he’s a walking nightmare wrapped in a security clearance. In 2023, Kash published his book, titled “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.” In 2022, Kash published a trilogy of children’s books including colorful figures like “King Donald,” the dastardly “Hillary Queenton,” and a friendly wizard named “Kash” who helped the king uncover plots.
Axios’s headline called Kash a “mega-MAGA loyalist.” Mega MAGA is even more MAGA than MAGA.
To say the least, Kash Patel is fervently anti-Swamp. Now, as director, he’s poised to settle old scores and reshape the FBI from the inside out, which he has promised to do. In an interview on the Shawn Ryan Show, he Kash said: “I’d shut down the FBI Hoover building on Day 1 and reopen it the next day as a museum of the deep state.”
Expect fireworks.
🔥 This week also featured the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the largest and most influential annual meeting of conservative activists and luminaries. This year’s conference has not been without its controversies, but this morning let’s focus on this quick interview clip with newly confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi.
CLIP: Pam Bondi teases Epstein document dump (0:50).
“Donald Trump doesn’t make empty promises,” Bondi said in the clip. She was referring to the President’s promise to disclose the government’s Epstein files. But she went further. “I was briefed on that yesterday. I can’t talk about that publicly. But President Trump has given a very strong directive on that and that’s going to be followed. A lot of documents.”
Bondi didn’t just tease the Epstein files—she practically dangled them over a pit of sharks. ‘A lot of documents,’ she said. Somewhere, white-faced attorneys were already hitting speed dial with shaky, nerveless fingers.
Last week, the UK Times ran a story headlined, “Jeffrey Epstein ‘client list’ among files to be declassified. It reported how, during Kash’s confirmation hearing, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tn.) told Patel, “I have been working on this for years, trying to get those records of who flew on Epstein’s plane and who helped him build this international human-trafficking, sex-trafficking ring.”
Patel replied, “Absolutely, Senator. Child sex trafficking has no place in the United States of America, and I will do everything, if confirmed as FBI Director, to make sure the American public knows the full weight of what happened in the past and how we are going to countermand missing children and exploited children going forward.”
Even if the Epstein client list never sees daylight, the threat alone is enough to send shivers through every polished D.C. office. The Swamp isn’t just feeling the heat—it’s starting to drown in its own cold sweat. Some people—maybe some very important people—are sweating like an OnlyFans producer at a PTA meeting. Dripping. Profusely.
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Finally, enjoy this clip of conservative intellectual Victor Davis Hanson describing what we here at C&C have called it for years now: the counter-revolution.
CLIP: Victor Davis Hanson describes the conservative counter-revolution (4:56).
Elon re-tweeted that VDH clip this morning. C&C has gone mainstream. Did you ever think we’d see the day?
Have a fantastic Friday! C&C will be back tomorrow morning with another explosive roundup of essential news and commentary. Be here or be square. Or squarish. Either way.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
