The palm oil industry has put Indonesian Borneo at risk of devastating wildfires. Ahead of International Women’s Day, The Christian Science Monitor joins an all-female
Yesterday’s 5–4 Supreme Court decision requiring the United States Agency for International Development to start making payments that the Trump administration had frozen was immediately hailed as a signal of the justices’ discomfort with the administration’s efforts to feed “USAID into the wood chipper,” as Elon Musk colorfully put it . It was also said to suggest skepticism of President Donald Trump’s claim that he has the constitutional authority to impound federal dollars and ignore Congress’s spending commands.
Perhaps. But the optimism may be premature. The reprieve that the order offers is brief, the basis for the decision is narrow and procedural, and the eventual outcome remains uncertain.
In a dissenting opinion, four of the conservative justices said that the federal courts ought to play a highly circumscribed role in policing Trump’s efforts to dismantle agencies by preventing them from spending money. Although Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the liberal justices this week, that’s no guarantee of their vote when the case comes up in a different procedural posture, which it almost certainly will. The plaintiffs’ temporary victory could still curdle into defeat.
[Stephen I. Vladeck: The Supreme Court foreign-aid ruling is a bad sign for Trump ]
The key to understanding how the justices will think about the case is the Administrative Procedure Act, an 80-year-old law that allows injured parties to sue federal agencies that act in an unlawful or arbitrary manner. The APA is generally solicitous of lawsuits against the government, and is said to have created a strong presumption in favor of judicial review.
The challengers—USAID contractors who haven’t been getting paid—brought their claim under the APA. That’s natural. Although there’s some confusion about the precise source of the command to stop paying out on existing contracts—an executive order? a now-withdrawn Office of Management and Budget memo? DOGE? a directive from the secretary of state?—there’s no question that a blunderbuss spending freeze has been instituted.
If that freeze is illegal or arbitrary—and there’s a good argument that it’s both—the APA empowers the courts to set it aside and, if necessary, to enjoin the federal government from freezing the funds. Seen that way, the case is a bog-standard challenge to unlawful agency action.
But the APA is limited in some important respects. Of particular relevance here, a plaintiff can’t seek “money damages” under the APA. So if a government employee runs a person over and he wants damages for his injuries, or a government agency breaches a contract with a business owner, those parties can’t bring an APA suit. Instead, they have to take their case to the Court of Federal Claims, a special court that handles claims of money damages against the federal government.
The four dissenting justices, in an angry opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, insist that that’s what the plaintiffs should have done. Sure, the plaintiffs say they’re challenging a general spending freeze. But what they’re really challenging is the refusal to pay out on their contracts. The “relief” that they seek, Alito wrote, “more closely resembles a compensatory money judgment rather than an order for specific relief that might have been available in equity.”
That’s one way to understand what the plaintiffs want. After all, they do want money. Plus, the courts are generally reluctant to entertain broad-brush challenges to agency policy, especially when an agency is accused of not doing something that it’s supposed to do. Otherwise, as the Court explained back in 2004, there’s a risk of “injecting the judge into day-to-day agency management” of the agency’s affairs. The courts don’t want to be in the business of micromanaging all of USAID’s contracts.
[Read: Trump tests the courts ]
So which is it? Is the lawsuit best seen as an APA challenge to an illegal funding freeze? Or as a demand for money damages arising from specific contractual breaches that should go to the Court of Federal Claims?
That question has no intrinsically correct answer. It’s a matter of emphasis and judgment. A person’s preferred characterization may depend on their sense of just how aberrant and troubling the Trump administration’s actions are. The closer the case seems to a conventional breach-of-contract dispute, albeit at scale, the more appropriate sending it to the Court of Federal Claims may seem.
That parsimonious approach has all the virtues of judicial modesty. It also has all the vices.
There’s something deeply artificial about treating the case like an everyday spat over the terms of a contract for, say, military equipment. The funding freeze reflects a comprehensive, deliberate effort to destroy an agency that Congress established and President Trump dislikes. That freeze can be appropriately viewed as a discrete agency action that’s properly subject to APA review.
Contra Alito, just because the case is about money does not make it a case about money damages. The distinction may seem fine, but it’s got a long pedigree. “The fact that a judicial remedy may require one party to pay money to another,” the Supreme Court reasoned in 1988, “is not a sufficient reason to characterize the relief as ‘money damages.’”
Money damages, the Court explained, aim to redress an injury that’s already happened. They are meant to soothe past harms, not prevent them. Most APA suits, in contrast, are anticipatory. They allow courts to prevent agencies from harming plaintiffs in the first place. That’s what the plaintiffs are seeking here—not a financial remedy for a breach of contract, but an end to a funding freeze that causes them ongoing injury.
Moreover, conceiving of the case as a routine breach-of-contract dispute would have troubling consequences. If the case is forced into the Court of Federal Claims, the plaintiffs might eventually get a money judgment against the government, perhaps a hefty one, especially if they bring a class action. But the Court of Federal Claims likely won’t enter an injunction that ends the spending freeze. That’s not what it does.
And Trump won’t care that Congress will have to shell out cash down the line. His goal is more immediate and more destructive.
The outcome of this arcane jurisdictional dispute may thus effectively determine whether Trump has the power to impound federal funds and dismantle federal agencies. If he does, expect him to exercise that power again. And again. And again.
[Adam Serwer: Why Trump thanked John Roberts ]
Right now, all we know for sure is that four conservative justices are okay with that outcome, whatever the damage to Congress’s power to control federal spending. The three liberal justices probably aren’t, whatever the risks of excessive judicial interference in government administration.
That leaves Roberts and Barrett.
We don’t know what they think. The Supreme Court’s very short opinion turned on the case’s very hurried procedural posture. Once the lower court enters a more durable order, the case will likely wing its way back to the justices, probably within weeks.
At that point, we’ll find out whether the Supreme Court intends to serve as a bulwark against a president who is hell-bent on asserting the unilateral power to control federal spending. If not, yesterday’s order may come to look like a momentary, ephemeral reprieve in Trump’s ongoing assault on Congress’s power of the purse.
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In his day, the 18th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was what we would call a “celebrity academic,” enjoying top university posts and a wide readership for his books. This might explain some of the hostility that Hegel faced from his contemporaries. Arthur Schopenhauer called his writing the work of a “clumsy charlatan,” which rendered readers “incapable of reflection, coarse and bewildered.” His compatriot Friedrich Nietzsche snorted that an education based on “Hegelian craniums” is “terrible and destructive.”
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were largely overlooked during their lifetimes, so professional jealousy no doubt accounted for some of this. But deep intellectual differences also underpinned their animus. Whereas Hegel’s critics largely promoted individualism, the famous author of The Phenomenology of the Spirit taught that fitting into society is generally the best path to a good life.
For an individualist like me—a bit Nietzschean in worldview—Hegel’s approach might appear unsympathetic. But I have been reconsidering Hegel, and now I think that understanding his arguments for a more communitarian attitude might offer us a nudge toward greater happiness—one we didn’t even know we needed.
[Bertrand Russell: Philosophy’s ulterior motives ]
Hegel is probably best known today for his teleological belief that human history tends toward progress and is guided rationally by Geist, or “spirit,” a quasi-supernatural force for good. He taught that this progress is slowly achieved through the operation of the “dialectic.” According to this concept, a grand conversation occurs in three parts—thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—in which one side presents an argument (thesis), another side gives an opposing viewpoint (antithesis), and all of this results in a resolution (synthesis) that involves more nuanced understanding of the issues. This rational reconciliation of differences thus leads to advances—in other words, progress.
For Hegel, the Geist just needs time to work out its logic. Whereas today’s political arguments in America might look chaotic and terrible, Hegel might say that we’re too close to them. Take the longer perspective and you will see that spirit is placing the hard-edged progressive activism of the past decade in dialogue with the new electoral turn toward Trumpism, and that the synthesis of that dissension will be a more balanced moderation in the years ahead.
Despite ups and downs, Hegelian progress generally grants people greater happiness over time. Yet Hegel also made a startling assertion about when that happiness would be most abundant. “Periods of happiness are empty pages in history,” he wrote in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, “for they are the periods of harmony, times when the antithesis is missing.” In other words, we remember when life is a boiling cauldron of emotions and experiences, but these are not the really happy moments. Happiness comes in the peaceful, unmemorable parts of life.
So how do we get more of this unremarkable bliss? For the answer, in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel gives a practical tutorial in dialectics—first offering two common but wrong answers, then the right one. One typical wrong way we search for happiness is what he calls Recht (literally, “right”), which involves maximizing individual satisfaction or, more colloquially, “If it feels good, do it.” Hegel argues that Recht leads us to chase one pleasure after another, “ad infinitum, never [enabling] it to get beyond its own finitude.” In other words, the goal of individual satisfaction is like filling a hole that can’t be filled.
The other wrong way that people pursue happiness is through Moralität (“morality”), by exercising their own personal sense of right and wrong. This approach is more in line with the individualism of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer—to quote Polonius in Hamlet: “To thine own self be true.” Hegel never says that a person’s conscience is bad; he simply observes that relying solely on one’s own conscience can lead to problems such as loneliness and depression. (If you happen to be someone who insists on speaking up for what you believe is right and have suffered social rejection as a result, you might relate to this.)
For Hegel, the correct answer for peaceful happiness is Sittlichkeit, or “ethical order,” by which he means prosocial behavior grounded in tradition and custom learned from one’s community. As he explains in Philosophy of Right, this ethical order involves striving “to make oneself a member of … civil society by one’s own act, through one’s energy, industry, and skill,” thus “gaining recognition both in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of others.” This is where true happiness occurs, Hegel believed, because we succeed in realizing ourselves both as individuals and as members of the community.
For Hegel, then, we will find happiness by participating in the ordinary ways of well-ordered civil society. That means not dashing from excitement to excitement, pursuing your own goals to the exclusion of others’ well-being, or expressing yourself in a way that offends people. It means fitting in, conducting yourself ethically, with your family, community, and country.
[Arthur C. Brooks: How my struggle with Wittgenstein can make you happier ]
Modern social scientists have shown that this argument about Sittlichkeit is sound. The social capital one has as an active member of the community strongly predicts one’s happiness. Even so, to some people’s ear, Hegel’s conception of the good life may sound very conservative or reactionary. Just fit in! he seems to be saying.
As an Emersonian individualist myself, I recoil from such a command. How many times in history have people just gone along with what civil society deemed right and proper, not consulting their own consciences, in order to maintain a private happiness at the expense of what is just? The result can be dangerous, even barbaric, and sometimes, you have to sacrifice your personal happiness for what is right.
But I also see how this misses the way that Hegel’s philosophy can help a natural individualist like me. His injunction about synthesis and ethical orderliness can be a valuable corrective for a tendency to seek big experiences at the expense of the moments of peace, and an egotistical tendency to disregard the wisdom and desires of the community in favor of my own opinions. I like to use Hegel’s ideas in the form of a simple set of questions to help temper my nature. Perhaps this checklist can be useful to you as well.
1. Where can I find happiness in the ordinary, unremarkable points in my life? What gifts am I overlooking because they are not bright and shiny, although they are beautiful in their smallness? Perhaps this is a peaceful evening at home, a quiet walk before dawn, or a little contemplation over a delicious cup of coffee.
2. Am I looking for a lift in my mood today from my personal ambitions and primal drives? This is Mother Nature with her false promise that satisfying this or that urge will give me the satisfaction I seek. Instead, what individual desire can I shed today?
3. Am I asserting my views in a way that ignores others or is disrespectful to their dignity? Am I attached to my opinions as if they were precious jewels? How can I let go of my own rightness today and listen with love more to others?
4. How might I balance my own needs and desires with those of my family and community today? How can I be a better spouse, a better parent, a better colleague and friend, and a better citizen?
If you’re anything like me, there’s little danger that the fire of your individualistic nature will be extinguished by this interrogation. Instead, it should just sand down your edges a bit, make you more cognizant of your strong self-focus. With that awareness to keep you in check, you might just find yourself happier as a result.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson: American civilization ]
The work of any philosopher is subject to many possible interpretations. This is especially true of Hegel, whose prose is famously dense and elliptical—just ask Nietzsche or Schopenhauer—and no doubt, my brief account of his thought will earn plenty of disagreement. After all, Hegel himself is said to have remarked : “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me.”
But even on this point—about his resistance to intelligibility—I discern a useful Hegelian lesson for a better life. The goal is not to be understood by the world but to understand the world as best we can and participate in our human community with a spirit of love.
In 2018, Dan Bongino, then a right-wing podcaster who had dedicated his professional life to owning the libs, shared with his audience his latest triumph. Bongino had recently participated in a panel discussion about the “deep state,” one of his areas of expertise. The panel, Bongino explained, had turned out to be a setup. The moderator, the military historian Vince Houghton, was a closet lib, “some complete zero,” who, unable to keep up with Bongino’s formidable intellect, resorted to sputtering profanity.
But Bongino flipped the script. “I get up; I rip the microphone off; I storm off the stage; I’m like, ‘Screw this guy,’” he explained. “But here’s the funny thing, folks. The whole crowd at the panel—there had to be 200-plus people—storms out of the room with me!”
Bongino’s inspiring tale of persecution turned triumph, like other narratives he has repeated, bears some surface relation to the facts. But Bongino omitted certain key events. One was the moderator’s response to Bongino’s put-down, which a reporter recorded at the time: “You’re an idiot, you’re a moron, and you’re deranged!” Another is that, contrary to Bongino’s claim that the entire crowd stormed out with him, only half did so. The other half stayed and cheered his departure. The third is what Bongino did right before storming off, according to two people present: He chucked a bottle of water at the moderator’s head. Not exactly the picture of a man who has just overawed his opponents with the force of sheer reason.
[Read: A new kind of state media ]
Like many confident but unreliable narrators of the MAGA movement, Bongino has since moved on to bigger and better things. Last month, Donald Trump appointed him to serve as deputy director of the FBI. (A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment about the panel episode.) Even to those benumbed by the second Trump administration, this came as something of a shock. The bureau’s new director, Kash Patel—whose primary job qualification, like Bongino’s, is fanatical loyalty to Trump—initially placated concerned staff by promising to elevate career FBI officials as his deputies. But after the rank and file resisted demands by the Justice Department to turn over names of agents who had investigated the January 6 insurrection, the president decided that the FBI needed more political discipline, according to CNN , and compounded the effect of Patel’s appointment with the addition of Bongino.
In an email to FBI staff, Patel wrote that he felt “confident Dan will bring his vigor and enthusiasm to the Deputy Director role, driving the operations of this organization in the right direction.” This is, strictly speaking, correct, depending on how one defines right.
Bongino rose to fame as a former Secret Service agent who quit in disgust in 2011. (Given the agency’s shaky performance during the most recent presidential campaign, he may have been onto something.) He ran for Senate in Maryland the next year, lost massively, then ran for a House seat in Maryland two years later, lost narrowly, and then moved to Florida to run for the House yet again, finishing a distant third in the Republican primary. At that point, perhaps wisely, he transitioned from electoral politics to a successful career as a right-wing media personality and podcaster.
Bongino has written or co-written eight books, which is less impressive than it sounds, because he tends to regurgitate the same ideas over and over. Three of Bongino’s books cover the Secret Service, and another three cover the Trump-Russia scandal. To get a sense of how his mind works, I decided to read several of them, but after a few pages, taking mercy upon myself, I lowered the target to one.
Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump is the first volume in Bongino’s trilogy about the Trump-Russia scandal. Or, as Bongino would put it, the Clinton-Russia scandal. Bongino’s argument, familiar to anybody who follows right-wing media, is that the mistaken belief that Russia cooperated with the Trump campaign is the product of a vast conspiracy involving the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, and the FBI. Like a defense lawyer, he walks through the evidence selectively, presenting parts of it in the most sympathetic possible light (for example, when Russians proposed to help the campaign in 2016, Donald Trump Jr. had no choice but to listen) while ignoring facts he can’t spin. Bongino disputes not only that the Russians carried out the hack of Democratic emails in 2016, despite U.S. intelligence determining that they did, but also that Russia favored Trump at all—a preference that Russian propaganda was broadcasting openly.
[From the October 2024 issue: The man who will do anything for Trump ]
Bongino argues that Vladimir Putin would never support Trump, “a successful capitalist committed to spreading economic freedom throughout the world.” Instead, he argues, Russia likely preferred Clinton because “her leftist ideology mirrors her mentor’s, Saul Alinksy, the radical Marxist organizer who believed, just as Putin does, that ‘conflict is the route to power.’” The entire explanation hinges on a tenuous three-way ideological link, which in turn rests on a failure to absorb the demise of the U.S.S.R.
Like other Trump defenders, Bongino fails to explain the central flaw in the theory that the Trump-Russia scandal was manufactured to tip the 2016 election: If the FBI’s probe was intended to hurt the Trump campaign, why did it publicly deny his links to Russia until after the election?
In Spygate, Bongino wrote that the FBI was guilty of “false accusations, illegal spying, and entrapment”; taken together, this was “the greatest scandal in American political history.” Or, at least, it used to be. In January, Bongino suggested that the FBI was covering up the identity of whoever planted pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Committees on the eve of January 6, 2021. “Folks, this guy was an insider,” he said on his podcast. “This was an inside job. And it is the biggest scandal in FBI history.” Presumably, this would demote the previous greatest scandal in American political history, which also heavily involved the FBI, to the second spot. With Bongino now poised to operationalize his theories from a position of power, one suspects that more scandals are due to follow.
President Donald Trump has halted intelligence sharing with Ukraine’s military, days after he froze military assistance to Kyiv, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and national security adviser Mike Waltz said Wednesday. They described the decision as a temporary measure to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to peace negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Suspending intelligence sharing “could cost lives by hurting Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russian missile strikes,” Reuters said, and “underscores Trump’s willingness to play hardball with an ally as he pivots to a more conciliatory approach to Moscow.” The “suspension of intelligence sharing to Ukraine is a major concession” to Putin, The Wall Street Journal said, but Trump officials said it would push “Ukraine to negotiations more quickly than the pause in weapons shipments.”
Trump ordered a “pause” because he had a “real question” about whether Zelenskyy was “committed to the peace process,” Ratcliffe told Fox Business. But as Zelenskyy commits to peace talks, the pause “will go away” and “we’ll work shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine as we have.” Trump’s “ill-advised and weak decision” to cut off intelligence support to “our Ukrainian partners will cost lives” and cede more “American power to Russia ,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) said. “And, all the while, Putin has not let up on his illegal assault against Ukraine.”
Waltz told Fox News that Trump “will take a hard look at lifting this pause” if Ukraine agrees to scheduled talks with Moscow and takes unspecified “confidence-building measures.” The halt of security assistance will “reduce Ukraine’s leverage, weaken the Ukrainian military and therefore undermine Ukraine’s negotiating position with Russia,” David Shimer, former U.S. National Security Council director for Eastern Europe, said to The New York Times .
Mexico will not be required to pay tariffs on goods that come under a previous trade pact until 2 April.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday he wants to “get” the island of Greenland “one way or the other.”
The following was a statement that I had initially missed from the cabinet meeting that took place last week. Via Reuters: The EU was created to ‘screw the US’ , says Trump .
“The European Union has been, it was formed, in order to screw the United States. I mean, look, let’s be honest. The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it. And they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.”
Video at the link.
This is utter nonsense, as Kaja Kallas, the EU’s top diplomat, noted on Face the Nation .
Europe is a peace project. You know, it was created so that we wouldn’t have wars between the members of European Union, and we haven’t had.
For those who dozed off in history class, it is worth noting that both World War I and World War II started as great power conflicts in Europe, with countries like Germany and France as central beligerents. The 19th Century was rife with European wars, including things like the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, and the Franco-Prussian War. Indeed, the history of Europe prior to the end of the Second World War is a long string of wars, large and small, over territory and power. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a throwback to that era.
Since the end of WWII, however, there has been no continental war in Europe, and indeed, the continent has been, in relative terms, quite peaceful. Exceptions include the wars created by the breakup of Yugoslavia and various actions by Russia against former Soviet republics.
But there is no arguing that the period from 1945 to 2025 has been radically more peaceful than the prior two centuries (and more) of European history.
Two of the most significantly positive steps towards a more peaceful world stage were the creation of NATO and the European Union. Putting these actors, who historically fought one another, into a shared institutional framework has been a historical success. The creation of profound economic interdependence in Europe was meant, among other things, to make war between European powers unthinkably costly. And, further, to create deep and abiding ties among the member states. It was mostly assuredly not created to “screw the United States.” Trump’s belief on this count is warped.
All of this reminds me, to a degree, of anti-vax nonsense. People assume that the current state of the world just, you know, happened, and so there is no risk in letting things degenerate to a prior state of being.
Beyond that function, the EU is a massive market where the US sells its products, and yes, we buy theirs. Trump’s myopic understanding of economics utterly ignores the value created by a vast, global marketplace. And the fact that the US dominates the defense space means that we are in the driver’s seat in such matters. While there is an argument to be made that Europe is not adequately footing the bill on military matters, Trump seems not to understand that much of US power comes from its hegemonic position in this arena.
If Europe were to arm itself the way the US does, that would be a threat to US power and dominance. Or, as noted above, we could see great power conflict return to the continent, which will ultimately be good for no one.
It’s as if those who refuse to learn the lesson of history (and diplomacy, economics, science, et al.) are doomed to repeat them.
Or something.
The U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday rejected a bid by President Donald Trump’s administration to continue withholding nearly $2 billion in payments for foreign humanitarian work already completed under contracts with the State Department and USAID. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals in the 5-4 decision, which sent the case back to U.S. District Judge Amir Ali to “clarify what obligations the government must fulfill to ensure compliance” with his earlier orders to quickly restart the flow of money.
The “closely divided decision” suggests that the high court will subject Trump’s various efforts to dramatically reshape the federal government to “close scrutiny,” The New York Times said. Although the language of yesterday’s ruling was “mild, tentative and not a little confusing,” the “bottom line” is that Trump was dealt a narrow defeat on one of his “signature projects” — and we should expect some “major rulings testing, and perhaps recalibrating, the separation of powers required by the Constitution.”
Justice Samuel Alito, in an angry dissent joined by three fellow conservative justices, argued that Ali had overstepped his authority and said he was “stunned” the high court would reward such “an act of judicial hubris” that “imposes a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers .” The aid groups suing for their payments said the ruling “confirms that the administration cannot ignore the law” and must now “lift its unlawful termination of federal assistance ” and stop the resulting “needless suffering and death.”
Following Wednesday’s ruling, Ali ordered the Trump administration to develop a schedule for restarting the payments, setting up a hearing Thursday on the timeline for aid resumption . In a closed-door House hearing, Pete Marocco, the “Trump political appointee overseeing the dismantling of USAID,” detailed “concerns” he had about the ruling and “did not directly answer when asked by Democrats if he would obey the Supreme Court,” The Associated Press said.
The researchers found that females between the ages of 20 and 59 who had sex less than once a week were at a 70 per