Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump Pulls New Stunt as Agencies Defy Him

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

In a blatant power grab against Congress, Trump is now attacking independent federal agencies set up by Congress, declaring that they are no longer independent from him, and forcing all federal agencies to look to him and his Attorney General for every legal interpretation they need to operate, creating an intentional paralysis in agencies to undercut their ability to help the American People. Michael Popok examines the executive order and what it means if Congress and the Courts don’t fight back. Join the Naked Wines community and head to https://NakedWines.com/legalaf for 6 bottles of wine for JUST $39.99 with shipping included Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Try it today and get up to $75 in PC optimum points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Donald Trump has moved from attacking executive branch departments and agencies and their workers and has now moved on to a fight with Congress, lurching from one constitutional crisis about separation of powers after another. Now with a new executive order just signed yesterday in which he has declared that he alone controls all agencies, even those independently created by Congress, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, like the Federal Reserve, like the Federal Trade Commission.

Those are all independent agencies because Congress created them as a creature of statute. They do reside in the executive branch and that's why Donald Trump, taking up another page out of the Project 2025 playbook has declared that he alone is the unitary executive and every executive agency under him must report directly to him. No independent agencies. There's a very good reason we have independent agencies. This is going to set up a fight with Congress. The question is, is there anyone on the other side to fight back? I'm Michael Popak, I'm fighting back. I'm here on the Midas Touch Network and on Legal AF.

Let's get down to it. There is a animating feature of the Federalist slash Heritage Foundation slash Project 2025 movement. And that is there is one president, of course under Article Two of the Constitution, and all power of the executive branch resides in the president. There is no independent Department of Justice.

There is no independent FBI. There is no independent anything at all. That has been their credo for the last 30 or 40 years. A number of the Supreme Court justices believe in that, such as Neil Gorsuch, such as Kavanaugh, such as Alito and Thomas for four votes. What it means is all power is reposited in a unitary one person president.

And there is no such thing as independence. Why did we get independent agencies, independent Department of Justice, independent FBI, independent FTC and Securities and Exchange Commission, because we saw the abuse of power in a prior criminal president in the form of Richard Nixon

and Congress thought better of it and many of these things. But some of it, some of the independence, back to the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, come from the 1930s. It come from when FDR had tremendous power. It was our first and last fourth term,

almost fourth term president. And so Congress, there's this constant battle, attention, that the framers of our republic set up between the executive branch, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch. And if the legislative branch is going to be a lapdog and a wet noodle against a all-powerful megalomaniacal president who believes that he is a Leviathan that levitates above all the branches of government, which he doesn't, but he acts like he does and there's no resistance on the other side then where are we? And Donald Trump is taking full advantage of the fact that the 119th Congress has no spine,

will not get anything done, and they are merely a hand puppet for the presidency. So he's gonna keep grabbing in a turf battle. You think Russia grabbed a lot of Ukraine? Watch Trump grab a lot of the territory and turf that had been for historical reasons for generations reposited in Congress. In particular, let me just tell you what has happened with the announcement. You've got the announcement by Trump that all federal agencies are now subject to the president, that there will be no independent agencies, that he will set performance standards. And then here's the little Easter egg from Helm, which is right out of the playbook again of project

2025. The architect of project 2025, Russ Vought is in the office of management and budget. I said at the beginning of this administration selection process, the most dangerous person out there is Russ Vought because he believes that when Congress allocates money for funding, that the president has the ability to shut off the spigot and not spend the money, not faithfully execute the laws, to carry out the laws of Congress, the laws he doesn't like. Oh, you funded 100 million dollars for public education. I don't like public education. Turn it off. That's done through a process called impoundment or fund freezing. And even though there's a law in the books by Congress that says

the president may not refuse to spend the money that we allocate, we control the purse strings in our Constitutional Republic. Russ Falk doesn't believe that. Right-wing MAGA don't believe that. They believe that that is an illegal law from the 1980s and they're going to challenge it at the United States Supreme Court. Donald Trump, the starting point for this new executive order was a couple of weeks ago when he started to fire independent heads of these agencies, even though their terms were not up. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the FTC, the NLRB, National Labor Relations Board.

These people are not allowed to be fired except for misconduct. And Donald Trump fired them because he doesn't like the color of their skin, he doesn't like their political stripe. And so those lawsuits are some of the 70 lawsuits that are currently in the court system right now. So he started there, decapitating leadership of these independent agencies.

Now he's, he does understand that if he takes out the federal reserve chairperson or makes the federal reserve report to him on monetary policy that the markets will crash, that the markets will crash. So he made a carve out in his executive order that the only federal independent so-called, he called it, so-called independent agency that doesn't have to report to him directly is the Fed. That means Jerome Powell or Jay Powell. And that probably soothed the markets because they don't want irrational, erratic,

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for six bottles of wine for $39.99. And so what's going to happen with all of this? In a companion order, he also declared that independent agencies or agencies at all do not have the ability to take their own position about what the law means. That the only one who can interpret the law for the executive branch is Donald Trump and Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, and only she on his direction. Let me read to you from that particular executive order. No employee, Trump has declared by fiat, of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States

that contravenes the president were the attorney general's opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation without permission. I don't know how they're gonna run this government if every of the hundreds of agencies and departments, they're gonna have to run their interpretation of the law

past Pam Bondi. Seriously, this will create an instant impasse, an instant sort of analysis paralysis within the government. You can't run, I mean, this is just, you think a kindergartner wouldn't have come up with this. Every interpretation of the law is gonna run through PAM bonding and President Trump. How are they ever gonna operate the law?

So they don't want to, they don't want to. They figure, well, they can't get approval. There won't be any interpretations made. And this is where Donald Trump thinks he's on equal footing with the judicial branch in making interpretation of the law. See, we thought when the Supreme Court did the Federalist Society's bidding,

in Project 2025's bidding, and they got rid of what we call the Chevron Doctrine, in which agencies interpret their own laws, and the Supreme Court said, no, we interpret the laws. You don't listen to agency heads when it comes to laws. We thought that's where they wanted to end up. No, they don't want to agency heads when it comes to laws. We thought that's where they wanted to end up. No, they don't want to end up there. They want to end up with the president

making his own interpretations of the law. Now he's setting up a battle with John Roberts at the Chief Justice about who gets the final word on law interpretation. We know under the Constitution, but we have a president who is out of control. And at the same time, he's out of control, and at the same time he's out of control. He says in his executive order, I'm doing this to make these agencies responsive to

the people through the president. Okay, then pay the president back at midterms and vote out Congress, the House and the Senate. There's no other way to do it, because with this, There's no other way to do it. Because with this, sorry, with this new set of laws, the ramifications are as follows. The agencies will be paralyzed in their ability to act because they'll never be able to get interpretations through Pam Bonney and Donald Trump in time to matter, which is going to, again, hamstring and undermine

the ability of these agencies to operate. Donald Trump doesn't want the agencies to operate. He wants to put them all out of business. He wants to shrink the size of government negatively impacting your and my life. He doesn't want a social security administration. He doesn't care about your check deposited into your bank account. He doesn't care about disability payments, food stamp payments, health care for children, or solving the pollution crisis, or having money available in a natural disaster. And all the projects that Joe Biden and the

Democrats paid for through the Inflation Reduction Act that went 85% to red states, he's cutting all those off. Wake up those who voted for Donald Trump that are listening to my listening to the sound of my voice. This is what you voted for. We told you, I'm not here to tell you so, but we told you that he was going to follow the Project 2025 playbook. He was going to implement it with Russ Fawt at the Office of Management and Budget, who now has the power under this new executive order. If he doesn't like how the money's being spent, he can limit how the money's going to be spent to these so-called independent agencies to align them with the law, a law that's interpreted only by Trump.

You see the circular logic that's going on here? So the law is what Russ Vought says the law is, not what Congress says the law is, and that's the separation of powers battle. This is all making its way one case at a time to the United States Supreme Court, and they're gonna have to look Donald Trump in the eye and tell him one, you know, one way or the other whether they believe the executive branch is all-knowing, all-seeing, and all-powerful, and sits above the other two branches. They set this up with the immunity decision. They set us up for this. Now the

problem on that Supreme Court to round out this hot take is that Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas believe that all power reside for the executive branch is reposited in one person. And there is no such thing as an independent Department of Justice. Donald Trump is his own attorney general, he's his own treasury secretary, he's his own secretary of state, he's his own FBI director. They're okay with that. They think that's what the framers thought we wanted, or that's what the framers wanted.

That's not what the framers wanted. They left a king. You think they left a king to write in three co equal branches of government and a checks and balance system to give us a king and if there's an out of control president, they counted on Congress to control that out of control president through the impeachment process, which means we've got to empower Congress to use the impeachment process

by giving back to the other party, the Democrats, the impeachment and conviction power of the House and the Senate, which we could only do at the midterm, right? We're one day closer to the midterm. That's why the midterm is so important. They haven't just swung the pendulum in the other directions since taking office. They've wrapped it around their own axle and around our throats. So we've got to fight back. House, Senate,

impeach, convict. Does anybody doubt that if the Democrats were in charge of the House and or the Senate, we wouldn't already have articles of impeachment up and running for all of this, for the violations of separation of power, for the illegal firings of federal workers, for the illegal firings of heads of the departments of the agencies under which under the executive branch, for the cutting off of funding, to the cutting off of funding, to the destruction of entire departments and entire agencies, there would be dozens of articles of impeachment. And some people were saying, what can we do about it? Well, nothing at the moment,

other than continuing to do what we're doing in the courts to pin him down. He's issued already almost 60 executive orders. Most of the major ones are already tied up in litigation, winding their way up to the United States Supreme Court. The question is what is going to happen when they get there? What is going to happen when they get there? I'm going to continue to follow it right here on Legal AF and on the Minus Touch Network.

Follow me, Michael Popok. Tuesday nights, I got a show called Popok Live. Tuesday nights, 8 p.m. Eastern time on this YouTube channel, the Legal AF YouTube podcast, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and then on every audio podcast platform you can think of, and come on over to Legal AF of the YouTube channel, Legal AF MTN. We're doing about eight to 10 videos a day over there.

We just have to at the intersection of law and politics, and we need your help. So come on over and help us grow that pro-democracy channel as well. So until my next hot take, this is Michael Popock reporting. In collaboration with the Midas Touch Network, we just launched the Legal AF YouTube channel. Help us build this Pro Democracy channel where I'll be curating the top stories, the intersection of law and politics. Go to YouTube now and free subscribe at Legal AF MTN. That's at Legal AF MTN.

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