We Conservatives Need to – and Can - Conquer the Culture

Townhall 

We’ve been talking about conservatives and popular culture for years and years and years since the great Andrew Breitbart brought the question of pop culture politics to the fore. Are conservatives ever actually going to get into the cultural fight? Are our billionaires – Elon Musk, who’s done plenty, excepted – ever going to get in the game and stop writing checks to Con Inc. grifts like the Forum for Eagles, Families, the Flag, and Forums, and start producing actual cultural content? 

We’ve been asking that for a long time, and we have made progress. There’s good stuff out there, including, but not limited to, the ninth in the best-selling Kelly Turnbull series of People’s Republic conservative action novels. The latest novel is Panama Red, released earlier this week, and it’s as violent, hilarious, and full of conservative Easter eggs as you expect, and you should go get it. You should do that right now. The fact that my books exist is progress, partly because conservatives like me are out there creating content – and so is my cover artist, Sean “Salty Hollywood” Salter, who is also working on the upcoming Kelly Turnbull graphic novel (it looks amazing). I could make this novel series a success because the book distribution model has changed. I can partner with Amazon and have them do all the production while skipping the wine women gatekeepers of traditional publishing who have no desire to put out books that real men – as opposed to simpering femboys – like, regardless of how many men would swoop them up if available. 

You should also be able to watch Kelly Turnbull on your television screen, but TV and the movies remain the brass ring for conservative creators. The ability to produce visual content has increased dramatically with the advent of digital filmmaking. Still, cost and distribution remain the big issues if you want to be in the mainstream. You’ve got to fund your project and get it to people. The Daily Wire is doing some great work on that, but it went with a subscription model, which makes it hard to get people to buy just one movie. If you want to be in the game, you’ve got to be on one of the streaming services. And that’s the challenge. It’s got to be a professional product, which costs a lot of money. But even if you do that, the people who run the streaming services typically don’t like people like us and definitely don’t like the things we want to watch.

It’s not that my books and other conservative works are not popular. I’ve sold hundreds of thousands of them since I started writing them in 2016 because nothing else was filling the void for toxically masculine novels that eschewed feelings and embraced shooting. If a People’s Republic series were on Netflix, you would watch, and so would half of America. That’s not just because it would be one of the few programs that didn’t insult you; it would be something you actively wanted to watch. There are a few of those shows out there. Some people like Yellowstone. Some people like Landman. Some people like Tulsa King. That’s about all there is as far as testosterone television. And, not coincidentally, the same guy – Taylor Sheridan – has a hand in all of them. There’s literally one guy out there producing the kind of stuff half of America might want to watch.

Everything else is woke. It’s about lame people doing boring things, whiny women complaining about their frivolous lives, and unattractive people uglifying up your screen. Everybody’s got to have a place in the identity oppression pyramid. If they could, everything would be about a differently-abled neuro-atypical lesbian 2-spirit indigenous Hindu of color who is battling those mean Christian nationalists who just won’t let them dance for some reason. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, they can still shock you. Tune into “Queen of Coal” on Netflix: “A trans woman dreams of working in the coal mines – but in a town steeped in superstition and patriarchy, Carlita must earn her way underground.” 

I’m not kidding. That’s a thing. A real thing. I researched it. Someone went out there and made that show. And somewhere, an executive said, “You know what people really want? They want to settle back on their couch with some popcorn and a nice Merlot and watch the struggles of some deviant with a pick making his – I mean her – carbon-based dreams come true.” I kind of doubt a normal hero who’s not a perverted weirdo, but who likes to shoot communists with a big .45, is their cup of chai tea.

And it’s only going to get worse. To get some insights into Hollywood’s status, I reached out to my friend, conservative sommelier and Idaho real estate guru, Drew Matich, for his thoughts. He spent years as a behind-the-scenes executive in Hollywood on some of your favorite shows. Here’s what he thinks, especially in light of how Netflix is trying to swallow up Warner Bros:

“I wish I were hopeful. This merger of Warner Bros. and Netflix will just further the homogeneous nature of content by even further reducing the number of players. Paramount is also trying to buy it, but either way, it’s just going to combine two different studios. The only major independent creators left will be Disney and Comcast (Universal), and the only question there is which one Apple will buy. And believe it or not, this is a place where I hope that Elizabeth Warren gets on the warpath and screams from the mountaintops that this merger should not happen - purely for what will be the reduction in points of view.”

I asked international star of stage and screen Nick Searcy, who would be a great Clay Deeds (Turnbull‘s spymaster and general pain in the rear), what he thought:

“The biggest problem we have is that conservatives don’t invest in pop culture entertainment because they don’t appreciate the long-term impact it could have. They want a return on their investment immediately, and movies and TV are too risky. The next biggest problem we have is that we have not built a mainstream delivery system to get the few non-leftist projects that are actually produced out to the audience. This is because every film is produced one film at a time and then buried by the media and refused by the big streamers. 

Everyone always says ‘What about Angel Studios? What about the “Daily Wire?’ Angel Studios isn’t really a studio. They function more as a distribution company, which means filmmakers still have to go out and raise the money dollar by dollar, and THEN, if it’s something they think they can make money with, they distribute it. And the Daily Wire only puts their films and shows on their subscription site, so they aren’t really competing in the marketplace.”

I think Matthew Marsden would be an incredible Kelly Turnbull. He said this:

“Conservative actors are a threat to the status quo, that is why Hollywood has worked hard to get them out of the industry. The few who are still there don’t have a backbone and put money over principles, so don’t expect them to change anything. What regular folks don’t get is that they will get less and less of the kind of content they want to so if they do not have conservative actors in the mix, because they are the people who get the movies greenlit. No conservative actors, no conservative movies. It is important to note that conservative movies just means non-woke. Not preachy garbage, but movies that would have been considered the norm not so long back. Movies are the American art form. They are the ultimate art form, and the left knows that they will be in existence forever. They might not get you with their agenda, but they bank on getting your kids or grandkids.”

That’s a great point about creating a talent pipeline as a way to force acceptance. My pal @GMFWashington, who writes an essential Substack on Hollywood, is still in the business and still anonymous so he can stay in the business. Here’s his take:

“Conservatives don’t play the long cultural game as well as the left does. We long ago ceded the movie business to the Left. Now, all these years later, the greatest engine for exporting American values and culture to the world not only can’t be bothered, but doesn’t actually seem to like America very much. There are a lot of people like Mike Rowe calling for conservatives to re-engage with the trades, I would argue we need to be doing the same thing with the arts. And not just as outsiders, but right here in the belly of the studio beast.”

We need to end the outsider game and get inside. We need to be a fifth column of faith, family, and the Flag. We have a lot of work to do, but we’ve got the content, and we’ve got the talent to get this started. What we don’t have is the money and the distribution access we need to do what we want to do. We don’t want to be “conservative content.” We want to be “content.” Once they put you in a ghetto, you never get out. You become something, at best, alternative and niche, but more likely weird and ignored. Oddly, almost 50% of America voted for Donald Trump, and yet so little entertainment is specifically designed to appeal to that 50% of America. We can enjoy sports. We can enjoy unchallenging, utterly apolitical shows like “NCIS: Des Moines,” but content that actually speaks to us and our values isn’t there in proportion to the size of our demographic. 

We can and must keep knocking on the door, and even pounding on the door, and eventually the door is going to open, or we’re going to find a crack in the wall and go through it. But what we really need are conservatives with resources who can help produce the level of quality we need to compete and to overcome ideological resistance from the major distribution outlets. That’s when you’ll see Kelly Turnbull up on the screen in Panama Redand the rest of the People’s Republic adventures, and hopefully a lot more characters like him, but sadly, not before then.

Podcast thread for Dec 10

 

'Jingle bells, jingle bells...'

The EU-US Battle Line

American  Thinker 

UK’s Labour Censorship Initiative

As economic and cultural suicide stalk Western Europe, it has initiated efforts to hobble America's technological advantage and diminish our freedoms. The first documented attacks on our open dialogue came from the UK and began in 2018 when Morgan McGreevy, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff (then Labour Together’s managing director), began and funded an outfit called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). Recognizing that the online news purveyors could best be silenced by depriving them of funds, it first targeted UK outfits, but moved on in an attempt to starve U.S. outfits like American Thinker, Breitbart, Zero Hedge, and the Federalist of advertising revenue, and astroturfing defamation of such sites. 

In June 2020, a booster of SFFN’s campaign tagged Ford’s UK twitter account, noting that its ads were appearing on Breitbart. Ford UK’s twitter account responded that it was “investigating the ad placement” and confirmed that Ford “does not share the views expressed on the website.” By 2021, SFFN expanded to target Breitbart’s YouTube account. “Breitbart, who have: consistently denied climate change, promoted sexism, published racist conspiracy theories have a monetised YouTube channel,” SFFN complained in July.

SFFN encouraged advertisers generally to block their ads from appearing on Breitbart’s YouTube content. In order to scale up its demonetization campaign, SFFN hosted an excel spreadsheet “blocklist” on its website for years. It listed the URLs of “fake news” websites that advertisers could import into their Google AdSense profiles to block sites en masse from receiving their advertising. This included Breitbart and a host of other alt-right and conservative U.S. sites such as Zero Hedge, The Federalist and American Thinker from 2020 onwards, alongside The Canary and Evolve Politics. SFFN also provided a handy “how-to” guide for advertisers and brands, walking them through how they could add SFFN’s targets to their own personalised blocklist. By December 2020, the list had expanded to include 28 sites, including two platforms linked to the far-right British agitator, Tommy Robinson, most notably Rebel News.

Another of SFFN’s initial targets was the right-wing UK website Westmonster, which had been set up and funded by Arron Banks, a controversial pro-Brexit campaigner. SFFN accused Westmonster of being a “propaganda channel” for the Brexit Party and its leader, Nigel Farage. The Brexit Party was renamed Reform UK. On current polling, Reform is set to form the next UK government with Farage as leader. SFFN claimed that Westmonster’s coverage of Farage and the Brexit Party was disproportionate. The campaign’s evidentiary threads included allusive imagery of Farage standing with Trump, accusing Trump of peddling “toxic post-truth politics.” In one remarkable thread from May 2019, SFFN urged readers not to vote for Brexit Party candidates in the UK’s upcoming European Parliament elections.

SFFN also accused Westmonster of fueling “anger & hatred” towards migrants by “publishing a stream of scare stories about immigrants in other European countries [which] deliberately create the impression of hordes of violent foreigners on the doorstep of Britain.” In April 2019, SFFN said Westmonster “stoke[d] fear of migrants” because it included stories about Channel Crossings -- journeys made by asylum seekers on make-shift boats across the English Channel to seek refuge in the UK.

EU’s DSA

In 2022, the European Union got into the muzzling act when its Parliament passed the infamous Digital Service Act. Noted liars Hillary Clinton and John F. Kerry endorsed this, urging the EU to force Elon Musk to censor us after he bought Twitter.

For years, some of us in the free speech community have warned about the threat of the European Union to free speech, particularly in the enactment of the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). The EU has virtually declared war on free speech and is targeting American companies. That war just began with the first DSA fine. Not surprisingly, X was the chosen target -- a company blamed by many in the EU and the U.S. for rolling back free-speech protections. 

This is not the first effort by the EU to deal with the challenges to their autocratic rule created by Elon Musk’s $44 billion dollar purchase of Twitter and making it the world’s most widely available free speech platform. During the last presidential election, the EU issued a formal letter to him demanding that he censor a Trump interview. More recently they offered Musk “an illegal secret deal” to quietly censor users’ speech.

He refused. “At the time, a person with knowledge of the issue told Pirate Wires the Commission wanted X to hire a team of people in the EU that could number in the hundreds to remove “misinformation” on the platform. X would have no recourse in these removal decisions. Now, one year later, the Commission has followed through with their threats, fining X $140 million (the first-ever penalty under their Digital Services Act).”

The EU preferred the pre-Musk Twitter, where only posters they favored got blue checks (wider reach and greater credibility) and they could shut up dissenters.

Response to the EU’s Outrageous Overreaching

France’s digital minister hailed the action, as did Germany’s digital minister. Not that they matter as much in the end as the responses of U.S. Administration officials and Congress to the EU’s demand for what Peter Hague correctly dubs “dragnet surveillance.” Vice-President JD Vance warned against using “censorship” to attack U.S. firms. He called it “A fine for not engaging in censorship,” adding, “The EU should be supporting free speech, not attacking American companies over garbage.” Secretary Marco Rubio fired “The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.” Howard Lutnick stated: “The digital services act is designed to stifle free speech and American tech companies. We have made our position clear to our counterparts in Europe.” 

The U.S. has a number of diplomatic tools to counter the EU, U.S. pressure in trade talks and increased scrutiny of EU regulatory bias among them.

Congress has under consideration a GRANITE Act which would give us citizens who are targeted by the EU or UK with fines the right to countersue in U.S. courts.

The Administration is well aware of the European censorship drive and its consequences there. Last Month the U.S. government released a National Security Strategy paper which reports this about Europe:

American officials have become used to thinking about European problems in terms of insufficient military spending and economic stagnation. There is truth to this, but Europe’s real problems are even deeper.

Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP -- down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today -- partly owing to national and transnational regulations that undermine creativity and industriousness.

But this economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.

Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less. As such, it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies. Many of these nations are currently doubling down on their present path. We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau also notes the absurd contradictions of our role in NATO and the EU:

The US has long failed to address the glaring inconsistency between its relations with NATO and the EU. These are almost all the same countries in both organizations. When these countries wear their NATO hats, they insist that Transatlantic cooperation is the cornerstone of our mutual security. But when these countries wear their EU hats, they pursue all sorts of agendas that are often utterly adverse to US interests and security -- including censorship, economic suicide/climate fanaticism, open borders, disdain for national sovereignty/promotion of multilateral governance and taxation, support for Communist Cuba, etc etc. This inconsistency cannot continue. Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not. But we cannot pretend that we are partners while those nations allow the EU’s unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilizational suicide.

Short of voting to leave the EU, European citizens have no way to remove and replace the EU leaders who have driven this to a crisis, but the Streisand effect seems to be at play. Since the fine was announced, X reportedly has become the number 1 news app in France, Austria, Belgium, Portugal, Estonia, Slovakia, Malta, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria, and Slovenia.

What are the Democrats thinking? What’s their plan?

American  Thinker 

The American people now have no doubt that the Democrat party supports and values illegal migrants and the thousands of criminals among them more than they support or give a damn about American citizens.  

The American people overwhelmingly support deporting not only the brutal and violent criminals who entered the country during the Biden regime, they support deporting anyone here illegally.  

Why?  

They know they absorb the billions of taxpayer dollars, services, resources, and jobs meant for Americans.   Are there many people here illegally that we know and love and who we do not want to see deported? Of course.  May goodness, compassion and judgment prevail in the end.   

The billions of dollars fraudulently stolen by the Somali “community” in Minnesota is the tip of a very large iceberg.  We now know that hundreds of millions of dollars have been siphoned off by fraudulent Obamacare claims, billions by programs meant for the homeless in California, by the hundreds of NGOs under the umbrella of USAID, by illegal migrants who were given Social Security numbers by Joe Biden.  

We now know that the H1-B visa program is an enormous scam that has long been gamed and abused by Indians and that they most definitely take jobs from qualified Americans.  Why can’t thousands of brilliant American young people with graduate degrees in STEM find jobs?  Those jobs go to the cheaper labor imported from India.  H1-B must be ended abruptly.  If our young people cannot find jobs, afford to marry, or buy a home, they are not going to support the party that promised to make those things possible.

The Democrat party is now fully Marxist; no old-school liberal dare object to the communization of his or her party. They would be soundly punished.  

Criminals are to be protected because they are oppressed.  Their victims that they steal from, brutalize, rape, and murder are their oppressors.  

This is Zohran Mamdani’s ideology in a nutshell. He has vowed to stop sweeping the homeless camps from which much of the crime that plagues New York City arises.  He's appointed a convicted armed robber of New York City taxi drivers to his public safety and criminal justice commissions. Why would he do such a thing?  Because he empathizes with the criminals, as well as the homeless, and especially the illegal migrants.  That they have made the streets of NYC so unsafe does not bother him one bit.  He seems to enjoy the fact NYC’s law-abiding citizens are sitting ducks for the violent felons the state has already released onto the streets. He believes they deserve to not feel safe. 

Our left, especially the ultra-wealthy among them, enjoy great wealth but work hard to prevent others from becoming wealthy.  

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom lives in a $9 million mansion, yet he has thoroughly bankrupted his state on every level. Worse still he is doing everything in his power to prevent those who lost their homes in Pacific Palisades from rebuilding.  

Yes, that was a very rich neighborhood.  Now Newsom wants to transform the Palisades with low-income housing.  

You can be sure there is no low-income housing in his neighborhood just as there is none in any of the other oligarchal American swells – the Obamas in Martha’s Vineyard, the Bidens in tony Rehoboth Beach, the Kamala Harris pair in the rich Brentwood enclave, nor do creatures such as John Kerry or Bill Gates.  

Our ultra-rich mean to stay the ultra-rich, insulated from the people they find so distasteful.  The rest of America be damned. Donald Trump is the only rich guy who has ever wanted to level the playing field and the Democrats are fighting him every inch of the way. God forbid the deplorables gain a foothold on the American dream.  This is their plan and they are sticking to it. 

In the meantime, the left is oh, so busy advancing their color revolution against the Trump administration.  

The men and women of the “seditious six” are either willing participants or useful idiots for those who for the last ten years have been doing everything in their power to destroy Trump; Norm Eisen, Mark Elias, George Soros, Reid Hoffman, Merrick Garland, Alejandro Mayorkas, etc., and everyone in Biden’s weaponized FBI, CIA, DOJ and IRS.  

Despite Trump’s re-election, they’ve not given up on vaporizing Trump’s presidency.  It is their mission in life and they do not realize they are on the wrong side of every issue – climate change, transgenderism, DEI, meritocracy (they are against it), wokery (they hoped to mandate it).  The looney left loathes the military, truly hates all conservatives, has essentially come out against white men as the most dangerous species on the planet.  

Instead, they embrace the Somalis, let them get away with massive fraud so they won’t call them racists, and do everything they can to prevent white males from succeeding on any front.  

It’s disgusting and thoroughly anti-American. They hate that it was old, white men who drafted the finest document in world history, our Constitution and Bill of Rights.  But it was … the greatest document ever written. They cannot change that.  

It’s hilarious when anti-American persons like Ilhan Omar cite the Constitution as if she has any notion of the depth of knowledge that inspired it or that she knows the difference between a democracy and a republic. 

We know what the Dems are thinking: that they can lie, cheat and steal, and color-revolution their way to victory like they did in 2020.  

Who are the current “leaders” of their party?  Hakeem Jeffries, known as the Dollar Store Obama; the dimwitted AOC; the imbecilic Eric Swalwell; the impossibly ridiculous Jasmine Crockett; and the most corrupt, malevolent governor in the country, which is saying a lot: Gavin Newsom.  

That some youngsters see Newsom as a viable candidate for president in 2028 is a very bad, depressing sign.  

Trump and his supporters have a great deal of work to do before the 2026 midterms.  

Trump has accomplished amazing things but the wisdom of his policies has not yet drifted down to the generations who still cannot afford to get married and buy a house or, if a STEM grad, get a job.  

Something drastic has to happen very soon or all is lost.   

The lunatic left will do their worst. That is their plan: to take President Trump down by any means necessary.

🎭 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓

 

Welcome to 

The 𝐖𝟑𝐏 𝓓𝓐𝓘𝓛𝓨 𝓗𝓾𝓶𝓸𝓻, 𝓜𝓾𝓼𝓲𝓬, 𝓐𝓻𝓽, 𝓞𝓟𝓔𝓝 𝓣𝓗𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓓 

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Trapped by old treaties with Russia, Europeans face threat of heavy financial penalties

 A new report warns of the significant risk facing the European Union due to arbitration proceedings launched by Russian oligarchs and companies targeted by sanctions. 

 

 


https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2025/12/10/trapped-by-old-treaties-with-russia-europeans-face-the-threat-of-heavy-financial-penalties_6748331_8.html

Russia has not only threatened Europe through drone incursions and hybrid interference operations, but also in court. By exploiting old commercial treaties dating back to the end of the Cold War, Russian companies and oligarchs have multiplied arbitration proceedings to challenge the European Union's sanctions policy, posing an increasingly serious financial risk to member states.

This warning was issued by a coalition of European NGOs, including the Veblen Institute for Economic Reforms, Friends of the Earth Europe and PowerShift, in a report published on Tuesday, December 9 titled "Frozen Assets, Hot Claims: How Russian oligarchs and other investors sue over sanctions." These organizations estimate that at least $48 billion (€41 billion) has been claimed from the EU and its allies (the United Kingdom, Ukraine and Canada) in compensation for these sanctions – a minimum figure, as most of the 24 proceedings identified in the report have not disclosed the amounts sought.  

 

 After their villas, yachts and works of art were frozen following the invasion of Ukraine, several oligarchs have retaliated through legal proceedings, with varying degrees of success. In 2024, Piotr Aven and Mikhail Fridman won a case in the EU's court, which found their contribution to the war to be too indirect to justify the sanctions imposed on them. 

 

 

Patrick Byrne Now Claims He was/is a CIA Asset, Worked for John Brennan

Conservative Treehouse 

I have been asked repeatedly to discuss or share opinion on the Emerald Robinson group consisting of General Michael Flynn, Patrick Byrne and others.  I have intentionally ignored those requests because everything around the group itself has always been sketchy, especially Patrick Byrne.  {SEE HEREand SEE HERE}

Previously Patrick Byrne claimed he worked for the FBI in part of the operation to dirty up President Trump in the 2016 election cycle.  Accepting Byrne’s claims, not in detail – but rather the big picture, the sketchy part was always why would anyone trust what he says against the background of his admissions of willful association with such an endeavor.

That said, everything around Mr. Byrne was just, well, sketchy; as an outcome anything around the associations of Mr Byrne carried that same sketch. As grandpa always said, “hang around a one-legged friend long enough, and you’re gonna start limping.”  Today, Mr Byrne said he has been working for the CIA all along. WATCH:

I have no idea if Patrick Byrne is actually working for the CIA; however, if true that admission should only create an even larger FULL STOP warning toward anyone and everything associated.  Just walk away from it all, because if there is a factual CIA involvement in the ongoing issues of the team, an interested person is walking into a hall of mirrors.

It appears the current storyline that has drawn the admission (again, if true – which is sketchy) then Flynn Inc is providing conspiracy fuel for the Q-adherents.   That would explain some of the tribal responses toward the Byrne/Flynn activity.

Within the claims of Byrne there is a seemingly open admission that his group has been trying to send information into the office of Tulsi Gabbard, with both some success and some pushback.  Perhaps this is the “firehose of noise” that led to a prior request for assistance.

Bottom Line: Everything in/around Patrick Byrne seems increasingly sketchy and unstable.  Proceed with caution, absorb it through the entertainment prism, or like CTH, compartmentalize it, but mostly ignore it.

SCOTUS Appears Poised To Recognize That Presidents Run The Executive Branch

The arguments from Slaughter’s attorney didn’t appear convincing to the court’s conservative justices.

The Federalist

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES — The U.S. Supreme Court signaled on Monday that it’s prepared to recognize what the Constitution has unequivocally held for centuries — that the president controls the executive branch of government.

During oral arguments for Trump v. Slaughter, a majority of justices appeared favorable to the Trump administration’s arguments regarding President Trump’s firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). As The Federalist previously reported, the case deals with presidents’ ability to remove members of so-called “independent agencies” and could result in the court overturning Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. (1935), which upheld statutory limitations on presidents’ removal powers.

In challenging the precedent established in Humphrey’s, U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer posited the unitary executive theory, a doctrine that rests on the notion that the president has absolute authority over the executive branch. He argued that Humphrey’s infringes upon this constitutionally prescribed power, and as such, “must be overruled.”

Humphrey’s “has become a decaying husk with bold and particularly dangerous pretensions,” Sauer said. “As Justice Thomas wrote in [Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau], Humphrey’s poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people. And, as Seila Law held, the modern expansion of the federal bureaucracy sharpens the Court’s duty to ensure that the executive branch is overseen by a president accountable to the people.”

While many of the court’s Republican appointees appeared generally favorable to Sauer’s arguments, it was clear that the body’s Democrat appointees were not.

Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan espoused fears about what kind of power presidents would be given should SCOTUS adopt Sauer’s theory, with the latter specifically focusing on what kinds of authority presidents would have on bureaucratic rulemaking and other powers Congress outsourced to the executive. Meanwhile, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson effectively ran a full-court press for the unelected “experts” engaging in many of the activities Kagan described — a move she later repeated when speaking with Slaughter’s attorney, Amit Agarwal.

In contrast to the government’s position, Agarwal argued that a president’s “constitutional duty to execute the law does not give him the power to violate that law with impunity,” and that Trump’s firing of Slaughter is unlawful because “multi-member commissions with members” have enjoyed “some kind of removal protection” since the founding era.

“No tool of interpretation clearly supports the president’s assertion of an unrestricted and indefeasible authority to fire the heads of traditional independent agencies like the Federal Elections Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” Agarwal said. “The political branches are more than up to the task of finding reasonable legislative solutions that strike an appropriate balance. That kind of legislative solution is far preferable than abandoning a foundational precedent on which so much of modern governance is based.”

Differing from the views of their Democrat-appointed colleagues, the court’s Republican appointees appeared skeptical of Agarwal’s claims. Many of the latter justices specifically homed in on questioning the limits of the attorney’s arguments and whether Congress may restrict a president’s power to remove members of certain cabinet-level departments and other executive agencies.

Following unsuccessful attempts by Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas to get a definitive answer on the issue, Associate Justice Samuel Alito questioned how Agarwal can argue that Sauer’s position would “cause these allegedly revolutionary results without being prepared to explain more concretely … the limits of [his] own argument.”

“I could go down the list with you of the cabinet officers and ask you whether you think they could be headed by a multi-member commission whose members are not subject to … at-will removal by the president. Shall we do that? … How about Veterans Affairs? How about Interior? Labor? EPA? Commerce? Education?” Alito said.

Agarwal noted that, “based on a very quick preliminary analysis, it appeared to [plaintiffs] that the vast majority of executive departments wield at least some of the conclusive and preclusive authorities that this Court has recognized in the past, including criminal investigative and prosecutorial authorities and also authorities implicating national security and foreign relations.” He then agreed with Alito that “for a lot of those [cabinet-level agencies], you could probably take those out, and at that point, there’s going to be a fair question about whether … Congress and the president, acting together, could determine at some point that there is a need for a multi-member body of experts to preside over certain government functions.”

“I don’t think that you should categorically rule out that possibility as a matter of constitutional law,” Agarwal said.

The arguments from Slaughter’s attorney didn’t appear convincing to the rest of the court’s conservative justices.

Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted her apparent uncertainty about the court adopting Agarwal’s position. She specifically pressed Slaughter’s counsel on the lack of history to justify his argument about presidential removal authority.

Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemingly expressed concerns about how Agarwal’s theory could lead to independent agency commissioners subverting the will of future presidents. In one hypothetical, he questioned what would happen if a political party that controls both the White House and Congress were to create a bunch of new independent agencies and extend the terms of their commissioners “as to thwart future presidents of the opposite party.”

“To Justice Barrett’s point, I don’t think we can just say, ‘Oh, that hasn’t happened, so it’ll never happen,’” Kavanaugh said.

Perhaps one of the most notable exchanges came between Agarwal and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, who exposed the attorney’s illogical arguments surrounding presidents’ removal powers.

“I’m wondering … I’ll put my cards on the table — maybe it’s a recognition that Humphrey’s Executor was poorly reasoned and that there is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative. Maybe you’re trying to back-fill it with a better new theory that itself recognizes that we’ve got a problem,” Gorsuch said.

A decision in Trump v. Slaughter is not expected until sometime next year.

Justice Gorsuch Exposes Attorney’s Illogical Defense Of Unchecked Bureaucracy

‘There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative,’ said Justice Gorsuch.

The Federalist

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES — Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch dismantled a lawyer’s illogical arguments about a president’s executive power during a high-stakes Supreme Court hearing on Monday.

The moment came during oral arguments for Trump v. Slaughter, a case centered around President Trump’s firing of Rebecca Slaughter, a Democrat member of the Federal Trade Commission. As The Federalist previously reported, the high court will weigh the constitutionality of statutory limitations on a president’s ability to remove members of so-called “independent agencies” and whether to overturn longstanding precedent established in its 1935 Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S. decision.

During his questioning of Slaughter’s counsel, Amit Agarwal, Gorsuch sought to get clarity on the defendant’s arguments surrounding a president’s “conclusive and preclusive power[s].” In a straightforward manner, the Trump appointee asked Agarwal, “You agree, I assume, the president is vested with all the executive power?”

While Agarwal initially signaled his agreement with Gorsuch, he seemingly backtracked on fully standing behind his answer in a subsequent back and forth with the justice:

Gorsuch: You agree that [a president] has a duty to faithfully execute all the laws?

Agarwal: Yes.

Gorsuch: Civil and criminal?

Agarwal: We … agree that the Constitution imposes … on the president a duty to faithfully execute the laws, absolutely.

Gorsuch: All the laws?

Agarwal: Well …

Gorsuch: All — are there some laws he doesn’t have to? That would be news to our friends across the street.

Agarwal: The take care clause is a duty, and it is also a power, but the text of the clause does not provide that the president must have at-will presidential —

Gorsuch: I didn’t ask that. This is: does he have a duty to faithfully execute all the laws? … Yes or no?

Agarwal: I would say no, in the sense —

Gorsuch: No?

Agarwal: — in the sense … Let me … — there’s two different questions, and I want to make sure that I’m answering the questions.    

Gorsuch: The question is: does the President have a duty to faithfully execute all the laws? The answer is ‘no,’ why?

Seemingly reeling from the justice’s questions, Agarwal plainly said that a president “can’t break the law for sure.” He then apparently attempted to wiggle out of the tough probing by raising the question of whether a president must “be vested with statutory authority to actually enforce, directly enforce” the law but was cut off by Gorsuch, who noted, “I’m not asking whether he has to bring the indictment — I’m asking whether he has a duty to faithfully execute the laws.”

“I think the president does not, under both history and tradition … have plenary power … of supervision, but in the case of the FTC, he does have some power of supervision … if there’s a demonstrable, palpable violation of law, the president could absolutely fire a commissioner of the FTC under the plain language of the statute,” Agarwal said.

“So, the answer is ‘no,’ I guess,” Gorsuch surmised.

Seemingly not convinced by Agarwal’s arguments, Gorsuch attempted to further pin down how far Slaughter’s attorney believes these statutory limitations on the president’s removal authority should go under his theory. After a short exchange on presidential authority, the Trump appointee “put [his] cards on the table” and suggested that Agarwal’s illogical arguments appear to stem from an unspoken belief that Humphrey’s Executor “was poorly reasoned.”

“I’m wondering … — I’ll put my cards on the table — maybe it’s a recognition that Humphrey’s Executor was poorly reasoned and that there is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative. Maybe you’re trying to back-fill it with a better new theory that itself recognizes that we’ve got a problem,” Gorsuch said.

Agarwal claimed that his theory is based on the Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential immunity decision (Trump v. U.S.) and “goes all the way back to Marbury v. Madison,” which he said, “does not use the term[s] ‘conclusive’ and ‘preclusive.'” 

“And neither does Humphrey’s,” Gorsuch interjected. “It uses ‘quasi’ things.”

Following a further explanation by Agarwal on his theory, Gorsuch questioned what would happen if SCOTUS were to take up his theory “to back-fill Humphrey’s and go down this road.” He specifically probed about how they would go about deciding “what [presidential] powers are going to fall in and what are going to fall out” and if the court would “have just as much litigation over that as anything else [it] might do in this case.”

Agarwal expressed doubt that would happen, arguing that “independent agencies” have been around “for a long time,” and that, “We haven’t had any precedent ever striking them down.”