Good morning. It is March 14th. A few clouds are moving away in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

A US district judge last night threw out the Trump administration's attempted mass dismissals of probationary federal employees across 18 agencies. Those agencies, Politico writes, “include the departments of agriculture, Commerce, education, energy, health and human services, homeland security, labor, state, transportation, and treasury, among others. The order,” Politico writes “sweeps even more broadly than a ruling earlier in the day from a different federal judge who directed six cabinet departments to immediately rehire probationary employees who were fired under President Donald Trump's plan to cut the federal workforce. Both judges,” Politico writes “concluded that the Trump administration used false allegations of performance issues as a pretext to justify the large-scale firings and ignore legally mandated procedures for slimming the workforce. The judge who issued the ruling last night also ruled that the administration had implemented reductions in force, or RIFs, without providing legally required notice to state governments.” 

Whatever can be said against the judiciary, unlike large swaths of the press and the congressional opposition, these judges were unwilling to even move off of square one and grant the Trump administration its claim that these people have been fired. A mass-mailed form letter telling thousands of employees that they've all been fired for performance reasons, with no documentation of those reasons, is not a firing. It's just an effort to try to convince people that they've been fired. 

In a considerably less effective performance, in the face of contested realities, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, contradicting and or betraying the Democrats in the House, and most of his own Senate minority, announced that he intends to vote for cloture, which would, if enough Democrats join him, break his own party's filibuster and allow the House Republicans continuing resolution on the budget to go up for a vote and be passed by the chamber's Republican majority, averting a government shutdown in exchange for letting Donald Trump and Elon Musk continue dismantling the federal government, and also allowing congressional Republicans to arbitrarily blow a billion dollar hole in Washington, D.C.'s municipal budget. Despite having announced in his capacity as minority leader that the votes for cloture weren't there, the day before, Schumer had prepared a New York Times op-ed defending the choice not to let the filibuster happen and had it somehow all written up and ready to go as soon as he announced what was supposed to be the result of careful deliberation and consideration of his fellow senators' arguments. He also posted on Bluesky, “If we enter a shutdown, Congressional Republicans would weaponize their majorities to cherry-pick which parts of government to reopen,” a warning that loses all of its force in light of the fact that right now Trump and Musk are weaponizing congressional submission to illegally cherry pick which parts of government to shut down. Previously hostile ideological factions of the party have come together in horror and outrage at the prospect of Schumer rolling over. But for now, the united front has to fight its way through the party's own Senate leader to even reach the part where they fight Donald Trump. 

The Trump administration sent a letter to the president and board of trustees of Columbia University yesterday, rewarding the university's previous apologies and cooperation with a threat to further defund the university unless, as a precondition for formal negotiations, the university expels or suspends student protesters, abolishes its judicial board to give the president unilateral control of discipline, bans the wearing of masks—except for medical or religious reasons—in which case the wearers would have to display a Columbia ID on their clothing, punishes student groups, puts the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Department under academic receivership for a minimum of five years and delivers a plan for comprehensive admissions reform. 

Just very standard government oversight of how a private academic institution conducts every aspect of its business. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the lead news column is a NEWS ANALYSIS / Republicans In Congress Cede Power / Constitutional Clout Handed Off to Trump.” It's a roundup of just how bad the basic constitutional operations of the country are right now. The Republican-led Congress, the Times writes, “isn't just watching the Trump administration gobble up its constitutional powers. It is enthusiastically turning them over to the White House. GOP lawmakers are doing so this week by embracing a stopgap spending bill that gives the administration wide discretion over how federal dollars are distributed in effect, handing off the legislative branch's spending authority to President Trump.” Now, with the help of the minority leader. “But that is just one example of how Congress, under unified Republican control, is proactively relinquishing some of its fundamental and critical authority on oversight, economic issues, and more. As they cleared the way for passing the spending measure on Tuesday,” the story continues, “House Republican leaders also quietly surrendered their chamber's ability to undo Mr. Trump's tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China in an effort to shield their members from having to take a politically tough vote. That switched off the only legislative recourse that Congress has to challenge the tariffs that are all but certain to have a major impact on their constituents. Republicans have also stood by, many of them cheering, as the administration has upended federal departments and programs funded by Congress and fired thousands of workers with no notice to or consultation with the lawmakers charged with overseeing federal agencies. So far, No congressional committee has held an oversight hearing to scrutinize the moves or demand answers that would typically be expected when an administration undertakes such major changes.” 

Right below that in foreign news, “Leaders Standing Up to Trump
Widen Their Support at Home.” Strange how that works. 

Back up at the top of the page in the second news column is about a rare moment of actual congressional resistance. “Pick for C.D.C. Is Pulled Hours
Before Hearing / Longtime Kennedy Ally Fell Short on Votes.”  

“The White House on Thursday” the Times writes “withdrew the nomination of dr Dave Weldon a Republican and former Florida congressman to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Just hours before he was to have appeared at a Senate confirmation hearing. Reached by phone. Dr. Weldon said he had learned of the decision on Wednesday night and had been told by a White House official that they didn't have the votes to confirm his nomination.” That should make him only the second Trump nominee to be pulled back after Matt Gaetz, but even in a world where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gets to run the Department of Health and Human Services, the prospect of putting forward another vocal anti-vaxxer to run the CDC in the middle of a measles outbreak seems to have been too much. 

Speaking of life without vaccines, down below the fold, as part of the paper's five-year anniversary of COVID coverage, the story is “Covid Lessons: Would Schools Shutter Again?”  The story asks if schools would close if a similar pandemic came along. The first person quoted is Democratic Massachusetts representative, Auchincloss, who says, “‘it's so important for Democrats to do a retrospective on this episode.’ He has argued,” the Times writes, “that during the pandemic, his party ‘over-indexed’ toward the views of teachers unions and epidemiologists, who often pushed for a slow, cautious approach to reopening schools.”

“‘The extended closures crystallized how the party has been failing in governance,’ Mr. Auchincloss said.” What he's articulating there is essentially conventional wisdom among people who think of themselves as conventional liberals. But it's remarkable to read it in the context of an overall COVID retrospective project that included earlier in the week, a look back at the Fusco family of New Jersey, which had five members killed after they'd gathered for a big family dinner at the very beginning of the pandemic. The story today about school closures, talks about how the authorities had convinced themselves that by the fall of 2020, the children who went to schools might not be hurt too terribly by going back to the classroom, but nowhere, as is typical for every piece of writing about how closing the schools in the fall of 2020 was a mistake, does the story actually stipulate when it was that vaccines became available, which is to say, in the spring of 2021 for adults, and not until the fall of 2021 for children. People's post-vaccine complacency about the disease has now drifted backwards in time to cover the time when the disease was unpreventable and widely fatal.

If schools do stay open in the next pandemic, as they almost certainly will, it won't be because people got any smarter. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going with your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you can. 

Enjoy the weekend, get those tax papers together, not that anyone at the IRS will be there to read them. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.