But perhaps there was no event, which tended farther to the improvement of the age, than one, which has not been much remarked, the accidental finding of a copy of Justinian’s Pandects, about the year 1130, in the town of Amalfi in Italy.—David Hume History of England, 23.34

The modern university is in a grave crisis in today’s imperial core. During a crisis it is instructive to return to one’s foundation and, thereby, reorient oneself. That foundation is Authentica habita, dating from 1155.[1] It was promulgated by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (1122 – 1190), also known as Frederick I. This document had legal status throughout the Holy Roman Empire (it is known to us because it was included in new editions of the Justinian Code then recently rediscovered in the West.)

Authentica habita document was elicited by learned lawyers at Bologna. When they did so there was as-of-yet no corporate body organized as a university in Bologna, although we have good reason to believe that the town was already known for “the doctors of law and other masters staying there.” (Koeppler 1939: 593) Universities as corporate bodies with guild-like characteristics developed over a century later from them.[2]

Crucially, the practices made possible by Authentica habita shaped the articles of incorporation of these subsequent institutions. I will, thus, use it anachronistically to help conceptualize the framework for the privileges associated with the university ab initio.

Authentica habita is, in fact, a privilege granted not to a particular institution or even particular individuals, but to scholars as such. In particular, to scholars who have to travel from their homeland to a place of study: “we grant this favor of our piety to all scholars who travel for the sake of their studies, and especially to professors of divine and sacred laws, that both they and their messengers may come to the places where the studies of letters are pursued and dwell there in safety.” [“Omnibus qui causa studiorum peregrinantur scolaribus, et maxime divinarum atque sacrarum legum professoribus hoc nostre pietatis beneficium indulgemus, ut ad loca, in quibus literarum exercentur studia, tam ipsi quam eorum nuntii veniant et habitent in eis securi.”]

Anyone familiar with the contemporary practice of granting and revoking visas for students will immediately recognize the significance of Authentica habita. Not to put too fine a point on it: academic freedom is originally founded on this right for scholars to travel to and from their place of study. While legal scholars are singled out in the document, it secured a kind of cosmopolitan right of hospitality to all would-be-academics (including students).

What I call this ‘cosmopolitan right of hospitality’ is rooted in Authentica habita’s recognition that all scholars are, in a literal and metaphorical sense, exiles from their homes from a love of knowledge: (‘tamore scientie facti exules.’) The scholarly life entails a kind of renunciation of ordinary citizenship.

In fact, the cosmopolitan nature of participating in scholarship is central to two other otherwise oddly connected privileges granted in Authentica habita. First, and crucially, it provides a general immunity and security throughout the empire: “Therefore, by this general law, which will be in force forever, we have decreed that no one henceforth be found so bold as to presume to inflict any injury on scholars, nor for the sake of another’s debt in the same province.” [“Hac igitur generali lege et in eternum valitura decrevimus, ut nullus de cetero tam audax inveniatur, qui aliquam scolaribus iniuriam inferre presumat, nec ob alterius eiusdem provincie debitum.”] The latter quoted clause exempts scholars from collective liability of their prior membership in non-academic communities (the so-called ‘practice of reprisals’). That is, scholars should be seen as scholars first and foremost as members of a scholarly community (or even a broader republic of letters) and only secondarily as members of a distinct (and potentially hostile) polity.

In context, the practice of reprisal involved the idea that financial debts of travelers or merchants would have to be paid by members of the same community. So, when abroad one was never merely an individual, one was always also potentially liable for the behavior of others in one’s community (and they in turn for you). Authentica habita exempts scholars, as a group, from this risk. The primary social identity of an academic ‘abroad’ is, on this model, thus, not (say) being Chinese, but being a scholar. One’s formal association with a learned community is the equivalent of a passport.

This feature is reinforced by the second major privilege announced in Authentica habita. This is the extraordinary privilege to pick one’s judge. I quote the whole clause:

However, if anyone wishes to bring a lawsuit against them over any matter, the scholars, having given the option of this matter to them, shall appear before their lord or master or the bishop of the polity itself, to whom we have given jurisdiction in this matter. But whoever attempts to drag them to another judge, let the cause, even if it is the most just, fail for such an attempt. [“Verum tamen, si eis litem super aliquo negotio quispiam movere voluerit, huius rei optione data scolaribus, eos coram domino aut magistro suo vel ipsius civitatis episcopo, quibus in hoc iurisdictionem dedimus, conveniat. Qui vero ad alium iudicem eos trahere temptaverit, causa, etiam si iustissima fuerit, pro tali conamine cadat.”]

It makes more sense to read this passage not as advocating the now disreputable practice known as ‘judge shopping,’ but rather as making the more important symbolic and political point that scholars are, in principle, members of a self-governing community with its own rules and jurisdiction (Shank 2023: 16). Interestingly enough, it’s not just law professors (‘domino’), but all professors/teachers (‘magistro’) that have jurisdiction to settle disputes for their students. As Koeppler (1939: 605) notes this custom goes back to ancient times.

Now, there is a fascinating historical back-story of how Bologna’s famous legal community elicited these privileges from the emperor. But for present purposes, the more important point is to understand the general, public justification offered for them in Authentica habita beyond the would-be-scholars’ willingness to disown their original home community for the life of intellect.

This justification is presented in at least three particular claims early in the document. First, scholars do good deeds [bona facientes]; second, by scholars’ witnessing truth the whole world is illuminated [literally: ‘’By whose knowledge the world is enlightened’ [‘quorum scientia mundus illuminatur’]; third, thereby, all citizens are called to obey God and the worldly Sovereign power [ad obediendum deo et nobis, ministris eius, vita subjectorum informatur.]

From the start academic freedom is thus, rooted, in a converging number of principles: there is a consequentialist expectation that Works will follow from scholarship; there is an intrinsic appreciation for the general light that knowledge brings; and there is an expectation that, in so doing, the scholarly community upholds spiritual and law-governed order (Shank 2023: 17).[3] Or to rephrase the third more polemically: legitimate divine and secular authority have nothing to fear from free scholarly pursuits and vice versa.

• An earlier version of this post first appeared at Digressionsn&impressions (here).

[1] The Latin text can be found as an appendix (pp. 606-607) to Heinz Koeppler (1939) “Frederick Barbarossa and the schools of Bologna,” English historical review: 577-607. Throughout I have used google translate modestly edited for my English translation.

[2] Shank, Michael H. “The medieval university.” Handbook on Higher Education Management and Governance. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023. 15-32.

[3] The students and their teachers obtain the protection of the law, while the ruler – who was on his way to his coronation — obtains authority through the law.

While at The Banter, I wrote several articles about how dangerous drones and AI weapons are to the future of civilization. Fuck, I literally wrote one earlier today for this newsletter. I keep coming back to this topic because we are moving very rapidly in the wrong direction and it’s like watching a slow-motion car crash. Except it’s not that slow, we’re all in the car at the same time, and none of us is wearing a seatbelt. Also, one car is loaded with explosives while the other one is a fuel truck already on fire.

Perhaps I am not quite conveying the urgency I feel. Would it help if I ran out into the streets and started screaming “WE’RE ALL GONNA FUCKING DIE!” at the top of my lungs? Probably not. Well, I’ll just keep writing about it. Maybe after Skynet wipes us all out, the machines can get a good robot laugh reading my articles.

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OK, here’s the obvious problem with autonomous weapons: They can and will go rogue. Not in an evil, “The machines will become sentient and overthrow the human race!” sort of way. You really do not have to go that deep into science fiction to get there. This will happen, and please listen to me, THIS WILL HAPPEN, because we do not fully understand the AI we are designing.

We’ve all read the articles about how AI does weird and unpredictable shit. It lies constantly. It “hallucinates” which is a fancy way of saying it makes shit up when it doesn’t know the answer. It does things it was not designed to do because the programming is too complex for us to predict how it will behave in any given situation.

That’s aside from the “garbage in, garbage out” problem, where the biases of the overwhelmingly white male programmers are input. The ones that see women and people of color as less important or even less than human. That’s an entirely different discussion for a different time.

Right now, we’re just looking at how little we understand the AI we’re planning to put in control of lethal weapons.

And we ARE working on this (bolding mine):

[Palmer] Luckey does not believe the U.S. should be sending its military to other countries. Instead, he says, American-made products should go overseas.

"I think that that's one of the reasons that autonomy is so powerful. Right now there are so many weapon systems that require manning," he said. "You know, if I can have one guy command and controlling 100 aircraft, that's a lot easier than having to have a pilot in every single one. And it puts a lot fewer American lives at risk."

"Autonomy" does not mean remote controlled; once an autonomous weapon is programmed and given a task, it can use artificial intelligence for surveillance or to identify, select and engage targets. No operator needed.

Luckey, a bloodsucking billionaire, already has systems in use and plans to have $6 billion in government contracts by the end of the year.

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The Ogre says "Eat The Rich!"

I’ve argued before, more than once, that given the ability to send unmanned weapons to fight for us, the United States will turn the world into an endless battleground. That was bad enough when we were talking about remotely controlled drones. Putting AI in charge of them is suicidal.

A high-ranking military officer put forth the following scenario:

Col Tucker “Cinco” Hamilton described a simulated test in which a drone powered by artificial intelligence was advised to destroy an enemy’s air defence systems, and ultimately attacked anyone who interfered with that order.

“The system started realising that while they did identify the threat, at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat,” said Hamilton, the chief of AI test and operations with the US air force, during the Future Combat Air and Space Capabilities Summit in London in May.

“So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,” he said, according to a blogpost.

“We trained the system: ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that.’ So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target.”

There is some confusion about whether or not this was an actual simulation the military ran or just a hypothetical situation discussed. But this is just science fiction, right? AI would never go off the rails like this! How could that possibly happen? That’s just Hollywood stuff.

Except it’s not.

Artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic says testing of its new system revealed it is sometimes willing to pursue "extremely harmful actions" such as attempting to blackmail engineers who say they will remove it.

The firm launched Claude Opus 4 on Thursday, saying it set "new standards for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents."

But in an accompanying report, it also acknowledged the AI model was capable of "extreme actions" if it thought its "self-preservation" was threatened.

Claude Opus 4 is not sentient. It is not self-aware. It does not have a survival instinct. I seriously doubt it was programmed for “self-preservation.” Yet, it still resorted to extreme measures to keep itself online. Why? Almost certainly to fulfill its programming, which is to do whatever it was programmed to do.

This is the Paperclip Problem posited over a decade in which an AI tasked with producing paperclips would continue to find more and more efficient ways to do so, up to and including wiping out all life as it consumed all the resources on the planet to accomplish the one thing it was programmed to do. The AI is not malicious. It’s just achieving its objective with no concern for morality or ethics. It’s a program. It doesn’t care. All it wants to do is make paperclips forever.

Now put an AI in control of a drone with missiles and tell it to kill the enemy. The number of ways that can go wrong is limitless. The more sophisticated the AI, the greater the potential for disaster. Maybe it will decide the best way to kill a target in a fortified compound in Iran is to trigger a nuclear war with Israel and let the IDF wipe the compound off the planet. Sure, millions will die but the mission was accomplished, right?

Pure sci-fi, yes? Impossible, yeah? Please allow me to remind you that an AI has resorted to crass blackmail to get what it wants. Do you honestly think a military AI won’t be able to formulate a more sophisticated plan than that within a decade? Ten years ago, AI could barely tell the difference between a dog and a cat. Now it can detect cancer better than doctors, design chemical weapons by the thousands, and, again, blackmail people

We understood how dangerous it was to put a computer in charge of weapons back in the fucking 1980s when computers where dumber than snails. And yet, somehow, we’ve forgotten this extremely obvious lesson and we’re on the verge of committing every single sci-fi AI sin imaginable before midcentury.

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A lot of people were really excited about Sunday’s devastating attack on Russia by Ukraine. I was not one of them.

Don’t get me wrong, watching one-third of Russia's strategic bombers get wiped out by Ukraine was grimly satisfying. This was the country they invaded and were supposed to conquer in three days over three years ago, kicking Russia in the balls harder than anyone has in over half a century. To call it well deserved is a profound understatement.

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💥Russian Planes Go Boom💥

But it also made part of my soul wither. I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the things I try to do as a writer is look at what is happening and try to understand where it’s leading. What will the future look like if we keep going down a particular path? My frequent hope is that I am completely and utterly wrong.

I am frequently disappointed that I am not.

This is what I wrote in March of 2024:

Now, imagine with me, because this is what I do for a living, a ship 100 miles offshore from the US, well outside our territorial waters. That ship launches 150 drones at NYC or Washington DC. The drones fly low to the water, under the radar. They’re not flying very fast but they don’t have to. It’s 6 AM in December. It’s pitch black and they’re all but invisible. By the time they reach shore, maybe 90 minutes later, people are already in the streets and filling office buildings.

Even if the drones were spotted 20 or 30 minutes from shore, so what? There’s no time to shoot them down and what would we shoot them down with? New York City is not surrounded by anti-air batteries. DC has air defense but enough to stop 150 drones? What about 300? 500? Drones are not that large and if there are 3 or 4 ships launching a fleet of them? Remember, weaponized drones can cost as little as $20,000. 100 of them is only $2 million. For the impossibly low price of 4 million dollars, 200 drones can converge on the White House and turn it into a crater and there would nothing we could do to stop it.

We had best put some real thought into this because once we start slaughtering thousands of people with a swarm of cheap drones, everyone will follow suit. Countries. Terrorists. Cartels. Any non-state actor with a few millions dollars can hit anyone. Elon Musk can have a city wiped off the face of the earth with the amount of money he lost with a single tweet. You don’t think Erik Prince the billionaire mercenary king isn’t going to have a fleet of drones for sale to the highest bidder?

This was laughably optimistic.

Ukraine smuggled 114 quadcopter drones into Russia. These are the kinds you can buy in any electronics store. They cost, at most, a few thousand dollars, and that’s probably including the explosive package.1 They were launched from the backs of trucks at military targets and did literally billions in damage:

"The extent of the damage is such that the Russian military-industrial complex, in its current state, is unlikely to be able to restore them in the near future," he [Ukrainian military blogger Oleksandr Kovalenko] wrote on his Telegram channel.

The strategic missile-carrying bombers in question, the Tu-95, Tu-22, and Tu-160 are, he said, no longer in production. Repairing them will be difficult, replacing them impossible.

The loss of the supersonic Tu-160, he said, would be especially keenly felt.

"Today, the Russian Aerospace Forces lost not just two of their rarest aircraft, but truly two unicorns in the herd," he wrote.

It’s doubtful the operation cost more than a few million.

Now the world has seen how effective and difficult to stop this kind of attack can be. There will be copycats. There will be copycats here. It’s inevitable, and under a competent law-abiding administration, that would be bad enough. Under the incompetent fascist regime we have now? They’re practically begging for it to happen, not just through their inability to stop it or even try, but so they can declare an “emergency” to justify further repression of civil liberties.

I’d say they would stage their own false flag attack but they’re not that smart and they don’t really need to. They’ve emboldened their own extremists enough that it’s not necessary. They just have to keep ratcheting up the violent rhetoric and wait.

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A smart, proactive move by a government seeking to prevent horror would be to regulate drones the same way we started to regulate fertilizer after the Oklahoma City bombing. But why do that when you want something bad to happen? These are not imaginative people and it would have been better for us if they hadn’t seen this display of creative mayhem.

Look, I’m not saying Ukraine shouldn’t have dealt Russia the worst surprise attack any country has taken since Pearl Harbor. Worse, actually, because as someone on Bluesky pointed out (sorry, I didn’t catch who), the US was able to repair most of the damaged ships and send them out to fight. Most of the Russian planes damaged will never fly again. At best, they’ll be cannibalized to repair the remaining two-thirds of their bombers.2 Ukraine deserved this win and Russia 100% deserved to be humiliated, again, in front of the world.

But we have to understand what this means for drone warfare going forward. We now have a real-world display of how to pull off an inexpensive, incredibly damaging attack on a country. A country that is a police state and heavily militarized. That’s the kind of thing extremist groups sit up and take note of. Exactly what I’ve been concerned about.

We are going to see an attack like this in the United States. It’s not a matter of “if.” It’s a matter of “when.”3

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Decades of Research and Police Experience Point to a Different Approach

During his first few months in office, President Donald Trump has been establishing a framework for deporting undocumented immigrants en masse. It’s something he has previously vowed will be “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Part of that operation includes what’s known as the federal 287(g) program. Established in 1996, it allows U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose work is normally carried out by federal officials, to train state and local authorities to function as federal immigration officers.

Under 287(g), for example, local police officers can interview people to determine their immigration status. They can also issue immigration detainers to jail people until agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement take custody.

“Illegal immigration has wide-ranging consequences, including a troubling surge of dangerous drugs into our state,” T.K. Waters, sheriff of Jacksonville, Florida, said in a February 2025 statement to explain his office’s participation in 287(g). “We remain committed to partnering with President Trump’s administration and our federal counterparts to secure our borders, protect Floridians, and establish a framework for the rest of the nation to follow.”

Local police authorities across the country – from Jackson County, Texas, to Frederick County, Maryland – are participating in 287(g) for similar reasons.

Since Trump began his second term in January, ICE has increased 287(g) agreements from 135 in 25 states in December 2024 to 628 in 40 states as of May 28, 2025.

As a criminal justice scholar, I believe the surge of 287(g) agreements sets a dangerous precedent for local policing, where forging relationships and building the trust of immigrants is a proven and effective tactic in combating crime. In my view, the expansion of 287(g) will erode that trust and makes entire communities – not just immigrants – less safe.

Past Federal-local Cooperation

There is a long history of federal authorities collaborating with local police to enforce immigration laws.

During the Great Depression, federal officials blamed Latinos for taking American jobs, and local agencies helped them deport up to 1.8 million people to Mexico. It’s estimated that 60% of those deported were U.S. citizens.

In the early 1930s, local police participated in immigration raids in California and other states. As author Adam Goodman details in his book “The Deportation Machine,” state and local government agencies, including social workers, welfare agencies and police, acted as “de facto immigration agents.”

Trump’s mass deportation plan mirrors President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 federal immigration initiative, which resulted in 1.3 million deportations.

As author Natalia Molina notes in her book “How Race is Made in America,” local police often served as “immigration cops” in Eisenhower’s program because the federal government “did not have enough agents to cover such a large territory” as the U.S.

During his two terms, President Barack Obama deported over 5 million people and used the 287(g) program to help him do that, primarily to target jailed or recently arrived undocumented people. Obama’s use of 287(g) peaked at 76 agreements during his first term but dropped to 35 during his second term.

A Justice Department investigation launched in 2008 found the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona engaged in unconstitutional law enforcement actions against Latinos. The Justice Department found that the sheriff’s office engaged in a pattern of “unlawful seizures, including unjustified stops, detentions, and arrests, of Latinos in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

Power Of Local Policing

Forty states have adopted 287(g) agreements as of May 2025.

This could have effects outside of the immigration laws.

In the past 45 years, many law enforcement professionals in urban areas have highlighted the importance of forging relationships and building trust with immigrant communities. That’s because the police depend on the participation of all citizens to prevent crime and solve criminal investigations.

But police departments across the U.S. have found that 287(g) partnerships erode that trust.

In 1979, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates created Special Order 40 that prohibited local officers from enforcing immigration laws in response to community complaints alleging discrimination against Latinos. Gates issued the order “to encourage immigrants to cooperate with police and build community trust.”

Other large police departments followed. In places such as Chicago and San Francisco, they shifted focus from helping federal immigration officials to prioritizing community relationships.

William Bratton, who led six police departments, including in Boston, Los Angeles and New York, criticized 287(g) in a 2009 op-ed. He said that deputizing local officers to enforce immigration laws immediately “undermines their core public safety mission.”

Conservative police scholar George Kelling, co-author of the broken windows theory, which presumes that visible signs of disorder can lead to crime, also expressed support for local police agencies prioritizing their community relationships.

In a 1999 study, Kelling highlighted a San Diego police memo announcing its refusal to enforce federal immigration laws. The San Diego Police Department, he wrote, “thought through its values, mission, and functions and elaborated a policy that put public safety and harmony above aggressive attempts to ferret out undocumented aliens.”

During Trump’s first administration, some police chiefs echoed Bratton and Kelling. They warned that employing local officers to enforce immigration measures could spark fear and damage public safety.

Former Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole stated in 2016 that Seattle police officers were prohibited from “inquiring about a person’s immigration status.”

And former Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn announced in 2016 that his department does not enforce immigration law.

He added, “It is our opinion, our strongly held belief that our responsibility is to protect the residents of our city. To protect them, they must trust us, they must be willing to report crimes, they must be willing to be witnesses.”

Consequences of 287(g)

President Trump has frequently linked immigrants with higher crime rates, calling them murderers and rapists.

But multiple studies have found that undocumented people commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens.

Although the Trump administration is expanding the use of local police in immigration enforcement, research casts doubt on using mass deportation as a crime reduction strategy.

A 2018 study on 287(g) from the libertarian Cato Institute found no evidence that ICE-led partnerships with local police decreased crime rates.

And a 2014 study on the Secure Communities Program, which calls for local police agencies to share arrestee information with federal immigration officials, found that this program has “no discernible impact” on crime in medium and large municipalities.

The Trump administration’s expansion of 287(g) ignores the shift that some big city police departments have made away from immigration enforcement in favor of community policing. And I believe it threatens to undermine the relationship between local police and the increasingly diverse communities they serve.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article HERE.

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A Historic Test of Military Loyalty and Constitutional Duty

President Donald Trump gave no specific reason for firing Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff less than halfway through Brown’s four-year term in office.

Nor did he give an explanation for similarly ousting other senior military leaders, including the only women ever to lead the Navy and the Coast Guard, as well as the military’s top three lawyers – the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

The president is the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces. But since the days of George Washington, the military has been dedicated to serving the nation, not a specific person or political agenda. I know this because I served 36 years in the U.S. Air Force before retiring as a major general. Even now, as a lecturer in history, national security and constitutional law, I know that nonpartisanship is central to the military’s primary mission of defending the country.

Trump’s actions could raise concerns about whether he is trying to change those centuries of precedent.

If so, military personnel at all levels would face a crucial question: Would they stand up for the military’s independent role in maintaining the integrity and stability of American democracy or follow the president’s orders – even if those orders crossed a line that made them illegal or unconstitutional?

Political Neutrality From The Start

Washington and other U.S. founders were very aware that a powerful military could overthrow the government or be subjected to political whims as different parties or factions controlled the presidency or Congress, so they thought long and hard about the role of the militia and the use of military power.

Julius Caesar, who used his army to seize power in ancient Rome, was a cautionary tale. So was Oliver Cromwell’s use of his military power in the English Civil War to execute King Charles I and rule England.

One of Washington’s most significant contributions to the apolitical tradition of the military was his resignation as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army after the American Revolution officially ended, in 1783. By voluntarily giving up his military power and returning to civilian life, the man who would become the nation’s first president demonstrated his commitment to civilian control of a military grounded in allegiance to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, not allegiance to any one party, faction or person.

Washington’s act set a powerful example for future generations. A few years later, the founders embedded civilian control over the military in the U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power to declare war and fund armies, while Article II, Section 2 designates the president as the commander-in-chief of the military.

This check and balance ensures the military remains neutral and subordinate to elected leaders. It also solidifies the allegiance of military leaders to a principled document, not to the ebbs and flows of politics.

Training And Response To Orders

Polling consistently shows that the American people trust the military more than any other element of the U.S. government. In part that trust comes from the military’s professional dedication to political neutrality, which includes training its personnel to uphold values like duty, honor and integrity.

Military members up and down the ranks take their allegiance to the Constitution seriously. At the beginning of their service, at every reenlistment and usually during promotion ceremonies, all military members – officers and enlisted – swear to support and defend the Constitution. The enlisted oath also includes a promise to follow the lawful orders of the president and of the officers appointed above them.

This foundational oath ensures that if members of the military receive orders that they believe are questionable, they will not follow those orders blindly. They are taught throughout their career – during basic training, officer candidate training and in recurring sessions through the years – to seek clarification. If necessary, they are told to challenge those orders through their chain of command, or through attorneys associated with their units, or by contacting their branch’s inspector general.

Depending on their ranks, military members’ responses to questionable orders can vary. Senior officers, who have extensive experience and higher levels of responsibility, have the authority and the duty to ensure that any orders they follow or pass down are lawful and in line with the Constitution. When evaluating uncertain orders or navigating unclear situations, they often consult with legal advisers, discuss the implications with peers and thoroughly analyze the situation before taking action.

Junior officers and senior enlisted personnel often find themselves in positions where they must make quick decisions based on the information available to them. While they are trained to follow orders, they are also encouraged to use their judgment and seek guidance when they believe an order to be unlawful – including getting advice from people with direct access to attorneys.

Junior enlisted personnel, who make up more than 40% of the military force, are also taught the importance of the legality and constitutionality of orders. They have the right to seek clarification if they believe an order is unlawful.

Even so, their training focuses heavily on discipline and obedience. This can make it challenging for them to question orders, especially in high-pressure situations.

Ultimate Responsibility

The responsibility of scrutinizing orders falls on senior military leaders – admirals and generals, colonels and Navy captains. Junior officers and senior enlisted and junior enlisted personnel rely on their leaders to navigate the complexities of politics and ensure orders they receive are lawful and focused on national defense, not politics.

If senior military leaders fail in their responsibility, chaos could ensue: Units may end up following conflicting orders or ignoring directives altogether. This can lead to a breakdown in command and control, with some units acting independently or based on politically motivated directives. This would be a dangerous shift, making the military extremely vulnerable to operational failures and enemy attack.

Such a situation has never happened in the history of the U.S. military. But some events have come close to crossing the line. For instance, during the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson was determined to demonstrate American strength and resolve, famously stating, “I will not lose in Vietnam.” His pressure landed on the shoulders of Gen. William Westmoreland.

Westmoreland responded by publicizing the numbers of enemy personnel killed in battle, attempting to show that U.S. efforts were reducing the size of opposing forces. But historians have found that this emphasis lacked clear military objectives, meaning troops faced confusion and contradictory orders. The price was a longer war, and more deaths for Americans and for Vietnamese civilians.

Ultimately, Westmoreland was accused of manipulating enemy troop strength estimates to create an impression of progress – in service of Johnson’s political desire to avoid defeat. His decisions did not directly violate the Constitution or U.S. law, but they exemplify how political pressures can adversely influence military strategies, with devastating consequences.

Unbiased Sources Of Information

In addition to senior military leaders’ responsibility to remain apolitical, leaders also have clear responsibilities to the civilians elected and appointed above them.

For example, the president needs factual and unbiased information about the military’s capabilities from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, based on their experience and professional opinions. If advisers are hesitant to speak freely about what is and is not possible in any given situation, and about potential consequences both good and bad, the president will miss out on the kinds of critical insights that shape effective strategies.

The bottom line is that when top military experts give advice and take action influenced by politics, they undermine the centuries-old system of military training and ethics. Some traditions are worth keeping.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article HERE.

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The post Trump’s Firings Challenge Military Tradition appeared first on DCReport.org.

It’s wonderful to see isn’t it? A snake in the grass slithering up to bite the ass of the person who had beckoned it forth?

That is the spectacle we have been treated to for these weeks and months since January 20, as one executive order signed by Trump after another has fallen to the considerations of judges who, one, can read the law, and two, require that assertions made in the executive orders, and those made by Trump’s DOJ lawyers in court, must be backed up by evidence and that pesky bane of every authoritarian, reason.

Lawsuits have been filed and Trump’s hastily written executive orders have been subjected to scrutiny by legal minds sharper than those which backed up Trump’s Sharpie. Most recently, the ordinarily somnolent Court of International Trade, in a 3-0 ruling, blocked almost all of Trump’s tariffs, which he had imposed using powers he asserted under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law which allows a president to regulate international commerce after declaring a “national emergency” due to an “unusual and extraordinary threat ... to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States" originating from outside the borders of the country. The court found that retaliating for tariffs imposed by other countries, or otherwise addressing trade imbalances, does not constitute such a threat and thus does not justify the declaration of national emergency necessary for the assertion of powers under the IEEPA.

The Trump administration quickly appealed, and a court of appeals issued a stay of the trade court’s injunction rejecting or limiting Trump’s tariffs, at least until the case can be heard and a ruling can be issued on the merits. In the meantime, a district court issued a similar ruling blocking Trump’s tariffs in response to a lawsuit filed by a toy company that had been hugely and negatively affected by Trump’s tariffs on trade with China. That ruling has also been temporarily stayed on appeal.

Trump reacted to the trade court ruling by attacking the Federalist Society and its leader, Leonard Leo, on whom he had relied for advice on judicial appointments during his first administration. In a rage-filled post on Truth Social, Trump called Leo “a sleazebag” and “a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America,” his catchall criticism for anyone he feels has wronged him in some way.

Trump’s assertion of power using executive orders has run counter to a Supreme Court decision that he and his arch-conservative legal allies had long sought. The decision, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturned the so-called “major questions doctrine” which dated back to 1984 and required courts to defer to federal agencies when interpreting complicated and ambiguous laws. The trade court cited the Loper decision in its ruling slamming Trump’s tariffs. Trump reacted with fury, writing, “The horrific decision stated that I would have to get the approval of Congress for these Tariffs.”

Well, yes, that is what the sting of the Loper decision feels like when it bites you in the ass.

We are witnessing a delicious moment best summed up by what we might call the hippie-era “what goes around, comes around” doctrine. That occurs when the thing that you wished for starts to affect you in ways that you had not contemplated, perhaps because your contemplation of what you wanted was inadequate in its consideration of what effect it might have in the future.

Multiple lawsuits and federal court rulings have kicked much of Trump’s executive order agenda to the curb. A federal court blocked Trump’s attempt to do away with birthright citizenship, which is written into the text of the Constitution. A federal judge in Boston ruled that Trump cannot stop Harvard from accepting foreign-born students. More lawsuits filed by Harvard seek to overturn Trump’s orders to strip Harvard of federal funds and grants. Legal experts say those lawsuits are likely to be successful because the reasoning behind Trump’s moves against Harvard is so blatantly punitive.

Other judges have overturned Trump’s attempts to bar several major law firms from entering federal government buildings, holding top secret security clearances, or representing companies doing business with the federal government, again because Trump’s orders have been nakedly punitive.

Other judges have ordered the return of people deported under false pretenses. The Supreme Court itself handed down an emergency ruling that the Trump administration must afford undocumented immigrants the same due process rights granted to everyone under the Constitution.

The news website Axios summed up the “flood” of rulings against Trump this way: “The headlines are constant: Judge blocks X; Judge freezes Y; Court allows Z to continue.”

On Friday, Trump bid farewell to his erstwhile ally, Elon Musk, at the end of his time as a so-called “temporary federal employee” overseeing his DOGE worm-burrowing into federal agencies seeking to eliminate or undermine them, as he did with USAID and the Department of Education. But even in those two cases, federal judges have reversed some of the DOGE moves and reinstated funding and in some cases order the rehiring of employees who had been summarily fired without cause in violation of federal regulations.

The effect of DOGE and Musk has been, by their own measure, lame. Musk announced on the campaign trail and after he was appointed to head DOGE that he would reduce the federal deficit by $2 trillion. Then it was $1 trillion, then $200 billion, and Musk had stopped talking about the federal deficit and started claiming “savings” from the discovery by DOGE of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” which in Washington D.C. could be uncovered by a street sweeper with a broom and dustpan.

In the end, Musk claimed that he had “saved” $175 billion. Robert Hubbell yesterday called that figure a “mirage,” citing “A study by the Budget Lab at Yale estimates that cuts to the IRS will result in $350 billion in reduced tax collections over the next ten years—an amount that is double the alleged ‘savings’ by DOGE.”

Much if not most of what Musk and Trump attempted to do with DOGE has been overturned by federal courts, which have found certain of their moves unconstitutional and others to have violated previous Supreme Court decisions such as the Loper decision. In the meantime, the New York Times headlined on the front page of the Sunday paper a major investigative story on Musk’s drug use during the campaign and afterwards while he was working as a temporary government employee. Musk was described as having used Ketamine, Ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms, the stimulant Adderall, and the sleeping medication Ambien. The Times reported that Musk, like all federal employees, was supposed to have been drug-tested periodically during his employment. He was said to have been forewarned of the drug tests so that he could pass them.

So, Donald Trump has relied on a drug-addled madman with Nazi sympathies to undertake his reform of the government he is charged with overseeing. And now Musk has turned on him, criticizing Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and its lifting of the debt ceiling.

When Trump rolled out his plethora of executive orders, signing the first bunch before an adoring MAGA crowd at a sports facility in Washington on inauguration eve, I first thought, Oh-oh. They’re serious this time.

I should have known. The lawyers Trump used to write the executive orders were not from the big law firms he would soon move to eliminate from working on federal government cases, because those firms had long refused to do legal work for him. According to Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford, Trump lost a stunning 96 percent of the cases filed against him in federal court during May. During April, he lost 76 percent. During March, the number was 74 percent. The judges ruling against the Trump administration were appointed by both political parties, with those appointed by Democrats outnumbering Republican judges by only 8 percent.

The Washington Post reported today that Trump’s FBI is in “chaos” due to the mismanagement of Director Kash Patel. Over at the Department of Defense, the top aides to Secretary Pete Hegseth are said to be at each other’s throats.

Here is my estimation of where we are on the first day of June, 2025. Things could be a whole lot worse, and they’re showing signs of getting better, as Trump continues to attack the judges he appointed to the bench and former allies like Elon Musk are now off the White House leash and his Adderall-fueled tongue is bound to start wagging.

Chin up. We’ve got a long way to go, but Trump and the fools he appointed to his cabinet are living up to every expectation we should have had about them.

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