Brunson and Butler on Vernuccio/Novak

This week’s Vernuccio/Novak Report features:

Ben Brunson, renowned commentator on Middle Eastern affairs and author of “Esther’s Sling” and “The Falstaff Enigma”
Charles Butler, one of America’s most forthright pundits and host of the popular radio program, “The Reality Check.”

Can the Courts block President Trump from firing US Government Officials?

For many who supported Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the past two months have been breathtaking. Of course, for those progressive Democrats who preferred “Sleepy Joe” Biden’s term in office, every day brings a new horror. During an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) summed up the perspective of the left: “Donald Trump is a chaos agent…[h]e’s unleashing chaos on the American people. We are not losing in court. We are actually winning in court. The Trump administration is losing. We are partnering on at least 79 different lawsuits that have been brought related to about 35 different illegal or unconstitutional executive orders. And the Trump administration continues to lose in court, after court, after court… Donald Trump is intentionally unleashing extremism and outrageous things on the American people to try to disorient everyday Americans. Donald Trump is not a king. We will never bend the knee. Not now, not ever.” Remember when the party out of power was called the “loyal opposition?” Clearly, Representative Jeffries used some extreme rhetoric of his own during his statement, particularly in his discussion of the Trump Administration’s losses in court, reversals which are allegedly based on the President’s “illegal and unconstitutional” Executive Orders. In a previous article, we discussed that these “losses” are exaggerated. The Executive Order on Birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens was objectively unconstitutional; the freezing of funds for foreign aid is not. One activity that has led to some confusion (at least among Democrats) is the firing of various government officials such as the heads of various agencies and governmental offices, an example of what Jeffries and his fellow progressives call “chaos.” (For some reason, no Democrat, except for maybe Texas Representative Henry Cueller, ever described the situation at the Southern Border during the Biden years as “chaotic”; but that is a subject for another time.) “In an unprecedented purge of the military’s senior leadership,” CNN reports, “President Donald Trump announced he was dismissing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown and replacing him with Air Force Lt. Gen. John Dan ‘Razin’ Caine…[m]inutes later, [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth released a statement announcing he’d fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the Navy…Hegseth called Franchetti a ‘DEI hire’ in his 2024 book, in which he wrote: ‘If naval operations suffer, at least we can hold our heads high. Because at least we have another first! The first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — hooray.’” Then there was this story from the Associated Press; “The Trump administration has fired about 1,000 newly hired National Park Service employees who maintain and clean parks, educate visitors and perform other functions as part of its broad-based effort to downsize government. The firings, which weren’t publicly announced but were confirmed by Democratic senators and House members, come amid what has been a chaotic rollout of an aggressive program to eliminate thousands of federal jobs.” According to Reuters, “[t]he campaign by President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk to radically cut back the U.S. bureaucracy [has resulted in the] firing [of] more than 9,500 workers who handled everything from managing federal lands to caring for military veterans. Workers at the departments of Interior, Energy, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture and Health and Human Services had their employment terminated…[t]he firings, reported by Reuters and other major U.S. media outlets, are in addition to the roughly 75,000 workers who have taken a buyout that Trump and Musk have offered to get them to leave voluntarily, according to the White House. That equals about 3% of the 2.3 million person civilian workforce.” Of course, not everyone fired during this allegedly “chaotic” realignment is taking their severance pay and looking for another job. Several, particularly the heads of certain federal agencies, have sought to keep their jobs with court actions – and some have been successful. Judge John Wilson’s (ret.) article concludes tomorrow