Friday Round Up! 10/24/25

We need to focus on the players who are throwing the game.

I’ve been traveling this week (see below for my panel with our Canadian cousins on how concerned we, and they, should be about what’s happening here), and I found myself a little overwhelmed with everything that had happened when I finally got a chance to catch up. So I asked you on the Substack chat to let me know what you wanted me to focus on this week. Among the common themes:

• Trump’s claim that the Justice Department “owes” him $230 million for bringing prosecutions against him (a “settlement” that he himself would be in a position to authorize)

• The Defense Department’s apparent acceptance of a private gift of $130 million to pay federal troops during the shutdown

• The demolition of the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom based on specs provided by President Trump, financed by private donors

I will get to the common thread in all of these, but to do that I’m going to start with a criminal case which may not even be on your radar — the charges brought against six NBA players who allegedly participated in a sports betting scheme in which they threw games for profit. You can read the indictment here, but the upshot is that the defendants, and nine unnamed co-conspirators, coordinated in advance that key players would not to play in certain games, thereby ensuring that bets predicting that that player would score under the “betting line” set by booking agents — made by those with this insider knowledge — would make money.

The defendants are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering, but the technicalities of the charges are less relevant than what anyone would intuit from reading the allegations: The conduct of the players, and those who conspired with them, violate basic tenets of fairness and the rules under which they are expected to play. When people watch a game, and especially when they bet on its outcome, they are counting on a “presumption of regularity,” to use a phrase — that everyone playing is going to play to the best of their ability. At the very least, they expect that those who don’t play because they are injured, are actually injured. Needless to say, when players don’t perform their assigned positions in the most robust way possible, the entire team fails.

The charges against the NBA players are interesting on two levels. The first is the revelation that these players were, according to the charges, deliberately not functioning as they should. The second is that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, which brought these charges, is functioning as it should, at least in this case — which is a pleasant surprise, amidst everything that is going on otherwise.

So what does this have to do with the news stories you all flag for me? Well, I think it’s safe to say that, whatever technical laws might be broken, we know that every one of them violates our sense of fairness and the rules under which our government works.

To wit:

• A President should not be able to pay himself out of the U.S. Treasury. Do we need to say more? (Not for nothing, but the 27th Amendment doesn’t even let Congress give itself a pay raise without the approval of their constituents.)

• Apart from the Appropriations Clause (Art. I, Sec. 9, Cl. 7) which requires that Congress have the power to determine public expenditures (which means that outside funds have to be deposited in the Treasury first), the Army Clause limits appropriations for the Army to two years, precisely to ensure that Congress has a frequent check on the President’s command authority, to prevent him from abusing it. I mean, imagine if George Washington had gone rogue, and wanted to be a dictator and turn the armed forces against the country. If Congress refused to give him money, could he have simply turned to King George III and said, hey man, help a brother out? I don’t think so. The same thing applies to whatever “private donor” is at play here.

• The White House is federal property, and Trump is a tenant, not an owner. I don’t know the specific rules and regulations that govern White House remodeling — it may well be that if a sitting President wants to paint the walls of every room chartreuse, he has the power to do that — but I suspect that latitude doesn’t extend to major structural alterations. When I got my downstairs bathroom upgraded from a half to a full I had to get a permit and two visits from the city (and my house is old but not a historical landmark or part of our country’s cultural heritage). I mean, if this is OK, what’s the logical stopping point? Can Trump build condos in federal parks? Blow one of the faces off of Mt. Rushmore and add his own? Start renting the White House for weddings?

So, we all know this is wrong. And the natural inclination is to ask, How can he doe this? What laws are being broken? Who has standing to sue?

Here is the thing: Our constitutional system is not designed to handle this kind of extra-constitutional lawlessness. We encountered a version of this when Elon Musk was taking his proverbial chainsaw to the federal government. Our system has two major checks in place, and one failsafe: the two major checks are the courts saying what the law is and Congress exercising its power of the purse. If court decisions are disobeyed and the power of the purse is meaningless, then the failsafe is impeachment, also in the hands of Congress. That’s it. That’s the system.

The point here is, we have a system that does work…but only when everyone on the team is doing their part. But if the people assigned to their positions on the team refuse to fulfill their role, or fake injury and don’t perform at all, the whole thing falls apart. And if that happens, we are being defrauded from the honest services of our government.

I say all this to highlight that at some point, we need to stop focusing only on Trump and retrain our sights on the relatively small number of people who could put a stop to this insanity — tomorrow. We’re talking about a dozen people. They, not Trump (or at least, in addition to Trump), need to be named, shamed, and held to account, just as the NBA players were in the indictment that was just filed. The question isn’t (just) what the mad kind is doing or what laws he is breaking, it’s why the people who are assigned to stop it aren’t doing anything.

This week, Renato and I are joined by a special guest to break down the recent voting rights case argued in the Supreme Court and provide the historical backdrop for it, and we discuss why the Bolton indictment is not like the other “revenge prosecutions” which have been brought so far:

Join me and Renato in Alaska!

It’s Complicated is cruisin’! Come join me and Renato as we explore the stunning beauty of Alaska and discuss how we can work together to protect our democracy! It’s a small ship, and there will be lots of opportunities to talk to us both, plus we will have an opening and closing reception and dedicated democracy discussion tables throughout the cruise. You can find out more at this link, and fill out your info here to have an agent call you with more information. Stay tuned for our next happy hour/info session!

My events this week:

I was honored to be a featured panelist and speaker for Dalhousie University’s 2025 Stanfield Conversations on the challenges to the rule of law and threats to liberal democracy. I was joined by CBC reporter and producer Mary Lynk and Dalhousie Law’s Professor Wayne MacKay. It was a great, if sobering, discussion — you can watch it here:

Upcoming events:

• THIS WEEK! The Freedom Academy Book Club with David S. Abraham, author of Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metals Age, Tuesday, October 28, 8 p.m. (sorry for the late timing but David is in Jakarta!) If you’re trying to follow the debate about critical and rare earth minerals (or want to know the difference between the two), you won’t want to miss this talk! Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers three hours before event. The talk will be recorded and posted for paid subscribers.

• Class Guest Speaker Professor John Witt, author of the forthcoming The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America, Wednesday, November 5, 7 p.m. EST. Our current moment has many parallels to the Gilded Age. The Progressive Era, which followed, generated many grassroots movements and jumpstarted our democracy towards what Scholar Robert Putnam calls an “upswing.” Professor Witt’s book is about one of those movements, which may hold lessons for us today. Please join! Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers three hours before event. The talk will be recorded and posted for those who cannot make it live.

• NEW! Time/Date TBA (likely late November/early December). Class Guest Speaker

  David Pepper
  , author of the Pepperspectives Substack, on Local Affairs and the Habits of Democracy. So excited to have my friend, law school classmate, and colleague David — who has been a previous guest speaker for my Substack class on the role of state politics in facilitating autocracy — come and talk to us about how we can effect change at the local level. Zoom link will be sent to paid subscribers three hours before event. The talk will be recorded and post for those who cannot make it live.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

I am getting a lot of questions from friends and colleagues asking what they can do in this urgent political moment. I have three potential actions steps you can take now:

1. Pro bono lawyers are on the front lines to stop Trump’s breakdown, takedown, and shakedown of the federal government. You can contribute to this effort on the donation page of State Democracy Defenders Action

2. It’s easy to feel like nothing matters, and I have heard a lot of people question in the last week why public protest makes any difference. This article, by Professor

   Nicholas Grossman
   for
   Arc Digital
   reminds us why.

3. Self care tip of the week: I got this in a newsletter this week and am going to try to put it into practice: “Trade one autopilot habit, like late-night scrolling or rushing breakfast, for a small savor, such as tea, a walk, or a book you love.” My autopilot habits are going straight to my laptop in the a.m. (and often skipping meditation) and late-night scrolling. What are yours?

‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.’

— The Masque of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley, stanza XXXVIII