The Headlines - Vance Challenges Courts’ Power, and Trump Targets the Penny

Episode Date: February 10, 2025

Plus, why golden retrievers keep losing.On Today’s Episode:Busy Presidential Day Ends at the Super Bowl, by Erica L. GreenTrump Orders Treasury Secretary to Stop Minting Pennies, by Yan Zhuang and Erica L. Green36 Hours After Russell Vought Took Over Consumer Bureau, He Shut Its Operations, by Stacy CowleyVance Says ‘Judges Aren’t Allowed to Control’ Trump’s “Legitimate Power,” by Charlie Savage and Minho KimWhy Federal Courts May Be the Last Bulwark Against Trump, by Mattathias SchwartzIsraeli Troops Withdraw From Key Zone Bisecting Gaza, by Lara Jakes, Natan Odenheimer and Ephrat LivniHow GoFundMe Became a $250 Million Lifeline After the L.A. Fires, by Ken Bensinger and Jeremy Singer-VineCan a Golden Retriever Win at Westminster? History Says No, by Sarah LyallTune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today is Monday, February 10th. Here's what we're covering. Ladies and gentlemen, if you could please direct your attention out the right side of the aircraft. Air Force One is currently in international waters, the first time in history flying over the recently renamed Gulf of America.

Please enjoy the flight. President Trump packed his Sunday. He doubled down on his order renaming the Gulf of Mexico by declaring it Gulf of America Day while in the air. We thought it would be very appropriate. He was on his way to the Super Bowl in New Orleans, the first sitting president to attend the game. And from the plane, he also rolled out new tariffs that he said would go into effect

today. Any steel coming into the United States is going to have a 25 percent tariff. What about aluminum, sir? Aluminum, too. Trump said sweeping new surcharges on foreign metals would apply to every country, including Canada and Mexico, the U.S.'s largest trading partners. And he said he will announce more tariffs this week. The new tariffs could draw more countries into Trump's trade fight and may encourage

them to retaliate with their own tariffs against American-made goods. And before Sunday was out, Trump also took aim at the penny. He said last night that he's ordered the Treasury to stop minting the coins, calling them a drag on the federal budget. It currently costs almost four cents to produce and distribute each one. And the U.S. Mint lost about $85 million making pennies last year. A lot of other countries around the world have also gotten rid of their smallest coins because of the cost. But it's unclear if Trump can do this, since coin manufacturing doesn't fall under the president's powers.

Also this weekend, the Trump administration started dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Bureau was created in 2011 in the wake of the financial crisis. It was designed to be a watchdog on banks and corporations. It looks for predatory lending practices and junk fees and can penalize companies that take advantage of consumers. But its work regulating Wall Street has put it squarely in the crosshairs of the administration, in particular Russell Vogt, who Trump put in charge of the agency on Friday.

Vogt has called the CFPB, woke and weaponized. And by Sunday, he'd ordered its 1700 employees to stop nearly all their work, locked them out of the agency headquarters and workers who tried to go get their laptops were turned away. Only Congress has the power to completely eliminate the CFPB and Senator Elizabeth Warren,

fought to create it in the first place said, what V, what vote is doing is illegal and dangerous, and we will fight back. Meanwhile, more than 40 lawsuits have now been filed in an attempt to stop Trump's efforts to reshape the federal government. And several federal judges have moved to block, at least temporarily, some of the administration's policies and actions, like ending birthright citizenship or giving Elon Musk's team access to sensitive data at the Treasury Department. But in a post on social media, Vice President J.D. Vance suggested the courts are overstepping by blocking Trump's policies, comparing it to a judge telling a general how to carry out a military operation. Vance declared, quote, judges aren't allowed to control the

executive's legitimate power. That is really a challenge to most understandings of our constitutional system of government, where it is the judiciary that gets to say what's legal and what isn't, what comports with the Constitution and what doesn't. JD Vance is suggesting that he may have a very different reading of the Constitution. My colleague, Matatya Schwartz, has been following the mounting legal cases against the Trump administration. One legal expert he spoke with said Vance's comments opened the door to a potentially

dangerous path. If the executive branch, the White House, decides it doesn't have to listen to the judicial branch, that could set off a constitutional crisis. This whole scenario sounds like a thought experiment. In many ways it is, but we are starting to see some early indications that the Trump administration, they don't feel like they instantly have to change their behavior in order to comport with what a federal judge has told them to do. There's a case in Rhode Island right now

where a judge has ordered them to unfreeze as much as $3 trillion of money that was going to the states, the states needed for essential services. The judge said, unfreeze the money. And now a few days later, the states are alleging that significant amounts of that money are still frozen.

So we're gonna see back and forth in court filings, we're gonna see the judge potentially weighing in with a motion to comply. And so that will give us some early indications of what the administration's posture really is gonna be with the federal judiciary and whether they're going to respect orders or whether they're going to decide

that because of how they view their own powers, they just don't have to listen to the courts at all. In Gaza, nearly all Israeli troops have now withdrawn from the northern part of the territory. The military is now mostly just stationed along Gaza's outer borders, Israel and Egypt. The drawback of Israeli forces will allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to continue returning to northern Gaza, which they'd been forced to evacuate early in the war. They're passing through checkpoints staffed partly by American security contractors. The withdrawal is part of the fragile ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.

Negotiations are underway to keep the truce in place and continue the release of the hostages. Three men were freed this weekend from Gaza, looking so gaunt and frail that the Israeli foreign minister said they looked like Holocaust survivors. The relatives of other hostages released in recent weeks say they rarely saw sunlight while in captivity and often went without food. They said some of the hostages occasionally caught snippets of news on TVs or radios about their families campaigning to get them released, and that helped them keep going. In California, the Times has been looking at how the crowdfunding site GoFundMe has become a crucial safety net for survivors of the wildfires.

The site says that donors have given more than $250 million to individuals and charities, more money than GoFundMe collected for all natural disasters worldwide last year. Recipients said they were able to use the money immediately to pay for things like clothes and hotel rooms while they try and make lists of every single item they lost for insurance payments that could take months to be approved. But critics point out that the surge in donations has also been good for GoFundMe itself. The site charges an almost 3% fee on all donations, and by default it asks donors to leave a tip, which goes directly to the company.

Overall, while the site has brought in a record-breaking amount of money, the total cost of cleanup and recovery efforts after the fires is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. And finally. In New Orleans last night, the Philadelphia Eagles beat the Kansas City Chiefs 40-22, crushing the Chiefs' dream of winning three back-to-back Super Bowls. But if you find yourself already missing the thrill of a run, the cheer of a crowd, the joy of an underdog win, judging in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show begins in just a few hours.

2,500 meticulously groomed and carefully coiffed pups will be fighting for the most coveted best in show award. Looking at 117 years of the award's history though, not all breeds stand a chance. Wire fox terriers, great posture, impressive facial hair, have won more than any other breed, while America's most popular dogs, oh-so-friendly Golden Retrievers, have never, not ever, won Best in Show.

When the chairwoman of the judges' education committee at the Golden Retriever Club of America was asked why, she got almost philosophical, saying, It's one of those questions that can't be answered. That said, there are a few educated guesses. Because Goldens are bred to be calm and steadfast, they might not catch the eye of judges who reward faster, flashier movements in the ring instead. Also, the dogs are judged based on how closely

they match the platonic ideal of their breed, and Golden Retrievers have a wide variation in their size and color. They're not cookie cutter like some other breeds. And it turns out there are no bonus points for being, oh my god, you're such a good boy. Those are the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford.

We'll be back tomorrow.