by Tony Wikrent
“A curtain of darkness is settling over our nation.”
Heather Cox Richardson, Apr 11, 2026 [Letters from an American, April 10, 2026]
It feels like something shifted in the United States this week after President Donald J. Trump threatened on Tuesday that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” As professor of human rights, global affairs, and philosophy Mathias Risse of Harvard University’s Kennedy School noted, the Geneva Conventions prohibit “acts or threats of violence whose primary purpose is to terrorize civilians.” He notes that Trump’s threat terrorized 90 million Iranians by threatening them with genocide.
Joyce Vance, Apr 08, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
…“You have asked,” it begins, “whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (“PRA” or “Act”) is constitutional.” The answer follows immediately: “We conclude that it is not.” There are two reasons, either of which, standing on its own, would have been sufficient to undo the PRA. The opinion explains that they are “interlocking.” The Act “exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers”, and it also “aggrandizes the Legislative Branch at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy of the Executive.” In other words, we’re watching another power grab by this administration, a stratagem to expand the power of the executive at the expense of Congress, while claiming it’s the other way around….
[TW: I hope readers who have been here long enough will remember that in the past few years I often linked to law journal and scholarly articles debunking the conservative arguments about “enumerated” powers:
- David S. Schwartz, “A Question Perpetually Arising: Implied Powers, Capable Federalism, and the Limits of Enumerationism,” 59 Arizona Law Review. 573, 575–79, 581–84 (2017)
- David S. Schwartz, Recovering the Lost General Welfare Clause [63 William & Mary Law Review 857 (2022)]
- Jonathan Gienapp, “The Myth of the Constitutional Given: Enumeration and National Power at the Founding,” [Am. U. L. Rev. 183, 194-209 (2020)]
- John Mikhail, “The Constitution and the Philosophy of Language: Entailment, Implicature, and Implied Powers,” 101 Virginia Law Review 1063, 1091–97 (2015) [hereinafter Mikhail, The Constitution and the Philosophy of Language] (parsing the Necessary and Proper Clause to argue that the Constitution’s text implies that Congress possesses many more implied powers than the expressly enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8)
- Andrew Coan and David S. Schwartz, The Original Meaning of Enumerated Powers (pdf) [Legal Theory Blog]
- Robert D. Cooter & Neil S. Siegel, “Collective Action Federalism: A General Theory of Article I, Section 8,” 63 Stanford Law Review 115, 150, 178–80 (2010) (promoting the authors’ theory of collective action federalism as a way to interpret Article I, Section 8 such that Congress is not limited to the specific instances of regulation provided for in the Constitution)
- Richard Primus, “The “Essential Characteristic”: Enumerated Powers and the Bank of the United States,” 117 Michigan Law Review. 415, 419–20 (2018) (examining the controversy surrounding the first Bank of the United States to uncover alternative understandings of the Constitution’s enumerated power at the Founding) ]
Brian Beutler, Apr 10, 2026 [Off Message]
Donald Trump now claims to own all of his presidential records. To be more precise, his Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which interprets law for the entire executive branch, recently opined that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional, and thus that any government documents that cross the president’s desk, or pertain to his work, are his to keep, unless he chooses to leave them with the National Archives….
This is bullshit because the president works for the public, not the other way around; he is no more entitled to make off with our documents than you’re entitled to charge a Ferrari to the company credit card….
…And we should suspect the worst, because this action only really makes sense as a fabricated legal defense against actions Trump and his subordinates have already taken or intend to take imminently. There was no reason for Trump to do this unless he means to make off with or destroy a large number of incriminating or valuable public records in short order—not merely at the end of his term. If Trump had sincere, above board motives, he could have challenged the Presidential Records Act in court directly, rather than make a lawless assertion of power and wait for litigants and judges to stop him. The reason an administration of such low character would do this now, years before Trump leaves office, is to begin the process of burying or destroying or privatizing records right away—many months before Democrats regain control of Congress….
Trump’s New Attempt To Keep You From Voting
Joyce Vance, Apr 06, 2026 [Civil Discourse]
Last Tuesday, Donald Trump signed a new executive order designed, to put it simply, to make it more difficult for us to vote.
War
Yes, Trump Might Use Nukes in Iran
Andrew Day, Apr 7, 2026 [www.defenddemocracy.press]
…Maybe these statements were just bluster, maybe not. Regardless, if Tehran doesn’t budge, Trump will feel pressure to follow through and turn Iran into an apocalyptic hellscape before tomorrow morning.
Trump might even be tempted to accomplish this monstrous objective with the use of nuclear weapons. Amid muddled messaging from the White House, one of the most consistent themes has been the declared intention to “obliterate” Iran—and nuclear weapons offer the surest way to do that….Moreover, Trump doesn’t seem to have internalized the “nuclear taboo,” the idea that strategic planners consider the nuclear option illegitimate and uncomfortable to even contemplate. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC reported during the 2016 presidential race that Trump had questioned a foreign policy adviser about the impermissibility of using nuclear weapons. “Three times he asked at one point, if we had them, why can’t we use them,” Scarborough said.
Campaign officials denied the report, but Trump had said something very similar months earlier during an MSNBC town hall. The moderator, Chris Matthews, pressed Trump on his prior refusal to rule out using nuclear weapons in Europe and the Middle East, leading to a remarkable exchange:Trump: First of all, you don’t want to say, “Take everything off the table,” because you’d be a bad negotiator if you did that.
Matthews: Just nuclear.
Trump: Look, nuclear should be off the table. But would there be a time when it could be used? Possibly, possibly.
Matthews: OK. The trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard it. [Then–Prime Minister] David Cameron in Britain heard it. The Japanese, where we bombed them in ’45, heard it. They’re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.
Trump: Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?
Arguably, Trump had a point. After all, a president can’t take nuclear weapons “off the table” without thereby negating their deterrence value. Still, the exchange suggests Trump approaches the issue with less gravity and forbearance than the average world leader….
“President Trump is clearly frustrated and looking for an off ramp to end the war, but seems to want to put some kind of exclamation point on the campaign,” Jennifer Kavanagh of Defense Priorities told The American Conservative. “He’s hoping for a big win that he can use to sell the war as a massive success. This could push him to escalate, even as the returns are diminishing.”….
When War Crimes Rhetoric Becomes Battlefield Reality: The Slippery Slope to Total War on Iran.
[JustSecurity, via The Big Picture, April 07, 2026]
Iranian power plants and other critical civilian infrastructure are protected from attacks by the law of war the United States helped craft after World War II. Such an object can lose its protection only if it is used for military purposes by the enemy and its destruction “offers a definite military advantage.” Even then, such an object can be attacked only if, after a case-by-case rigorous analysis, the “concrete and direct military advantage anticipated” outweighs the civilian suffering that is expected to result.
[TW: Aa number of Democratic Senators and Congressmen declared Trump should once again be impeached. Even former prominent Trump boosters such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have begun calling for the use of the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
[Because the (anti)Republicans in Congress will block another impeachment, I think a more useful and effective response is to introduce and fight to pass a law making it an explicit war crime for any President — absent a nuclear attack on the US or any of its allies, or without a Declaration of War by Congress — to order the use of nuclear weapons. To maintain the deterrent capability of US nuclear weapons, this law must be explicit that it does not apply to an order in which a nuclear attack on the US or any of its allies has already been inflicted or has already begun. This is necessary to maintain US strategic deterrence.
[By contrast, this new law would clearly state that any use of nuclear weapons outside this deterrent role would be a war crime.
[The introduction and debate of this new law can be framed and managed in such a way as to force supporters of the unitary executive theory to admit that either there are limits to presidential authority, or admit that their interpretation of unitary executive theory is not even bounded by the war powers clause of the Constitution. This admission would inflict serious damage on the unitary executive theory, especially in the court of public opinion.
[This would be much more likely to attract the support, or at least votes, of Republican members of Congress, and could be used to great benefit in attacking the unitary executive theory.
[This new law should also include sturdy and robust safeguards for members of the military who refuse unlawful orders. We have already seen Trump’s vindictive attempt at retribution against the Vindman brothers during his Trump’s first term, and the threats to prosecute Senators Slotkin and Kelly, and the Congressmen who joined them in publishing a video remining members of the military their duty includes refusal to obey unlawful orders. Will a JAG lawyer who advises a commander not to obey an order be subjected to retaliatory investigations, abuse, professional damage, and even personal danger by Trump and his agents? Using the hypothetical Seal Team 6 question during the Supreme Court hearing on Presidential immunity – what if Trump orders certain military units or operatives to kill any JAG lawyer opposing illegal orders? ]
Confirmed: Trump admin threatened to overthrow the papacy
Adam Lynch, April 08, 2026 [Alternet, via DailyKos, April 08, 2026]
Pope Leo XIV chronicler Christopher Hale says he has confirmed that Trump’s Pentagon threatened to declare war on the Vatican.
“In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture,” said Hale.
“America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world,” Colby and his associates informed the cardinal. “The Catholic Church had better take its side.”
As the room temperature grew, Hale said he confirmed that one U.S. official “reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.” ….
Citing a Free Press report, a writer obtained accounts from Vatican and U.S. officials briefed on the Pentagon meeting. According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at President Donald Trump. Hale said what “enraged them most” was Leo’s declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”
“The Pentagon read that sentence as a frontal challenge to the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’ — Trump’s update of Monroe, asserting unchallenged American dominion over the Western Hemisphere,” said Hale….
The Pentagon’s January confrontation with Cardinal Pierre signals an unprecedented willingness by Trump officials to pressure religious institutions into alignment with administration goals. This represents a potential inflection point: where diplomatic courtesy once governed state-Church relations, coercion may now be replacing negotiation. The Vatican’s refusal to participate in the 250th anniversary celebration underscores that even America’s most prominent religious institution will not compromise its moral authority for political expediency.
The Public Theology We Need Now — Moral compromise is far too common, but we know a better way.
William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Apr 11, 2026 [Our Moral Moment]
In the spring of 1933, while the world faced rising authoritarian movements, Franz von Papen traveled to Rome as a delegate of Germany’s new Chancellor. There he began negotiations for an agreement between the Vatican and the German Reich – a Concordant both parties would sign that summer, preparing the way for Hitler’s regime to advance its agenda for the next dozen years without mass resistance from German Christians. The details of the agreement were spelled out in several pages, but the structure was simple, and largely reflected how most Catholic and Protestant churches would negotiate the Third Reich: churches would be free to worship, run schools, and conduct social services as long as their preachers stayed out of politics.
The pastoral ministries of the Church could continue if it silenced its prophetic critique.
When the US President threatened genocide on social media this week, Pope, Leo XIV – the first American Pope – told reporters, “This truly is not acceptable.” He encouraged US citizens to call their representatives in Congress and demand a check on the President’s war powers. This was not the first time Leo (or Pope Francis before him) challenged Trump’s agenda, but it was remarkably direct….
The central question of public theology is always what God requires of us, no matter who is in charge. Throughout history clergy have been accused of being “too political” in times and places where political leaders did not want to have to deal with the challenge our moral traditions offer. The compromise that Trump demands today and that German Christians agreed to in 1933 has been made far too often in human history. It was the basic agreement between white churches and the Jim Crow regime in the American South, between church leaders and the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century, and between many governments and church institutions in between.
But this is not the only story of public theology that we have inherited. Two years before von Papen traveled to Rome to meet with Vatican officials in 1933, a handful of clergy, scholars, and activists traveled to New Haven, Connecticut at the invitation of seven African-American students at Yale Divinity School who had dedicated themselves to “service and sacrifice for Christ.” The students were concerned about the authoritarian movements of their day, both in Europe and in the American South. They also knew God had called them to become leaders in the church who could work together for “the creation of a new social order based on the principles of Jesus.”
Not content to simply wait for their theological school to equip them for this moral leadership, they called on a young scholar from Howard University (Benjamin Mays), a young labor organizer (A. Philip Randolph), a couple of preachers who had built large churches in New York City and Atlanta, and a couple of PhD’s who would go on to lead HBCUs over the next few decades. Only one of their professors, Jerome Davis, helped facilitate the gathering. For a few days, the small group reflected together on this question: how could they practice the militant nonviolent love of Jesus in a way that would bring down Jim Crow? They recorded their resolutions in a document they titled, “Whither the Negro Church?,” then they set about building institutions that could operationalize their vision.
Just five years later, one of those seven students and his spouse traveled with Howard and Sue Bailey Thurman to India, where they met Gandhi and continued the discussion they’d started about nonviolence. Others who’d participated in the seminar worked together to build the Institute for Religion at Howard University, where Thurman became Dean of Rankin Chapel. Mays left Howard to lead Morehouse College, and others from this “Rankin Network” went on to teach and lead at Virginia Union, Lincoln University, Shaw University, North Carolina College (now NC Central University), and other HBCUs. But their growing network came back to Howard for regular meetings and stayed in touch through the “Journal of Religious Thought” that William Stuart Nelson, a Yale graduate, edited.
The public theology of this network did not make headlines for the next couple of decades. Most of its adherents didn’t get big book deals or respected teaching posts….
Before Martin Luther King, Jr., James Farmer, Diane Nash and many others were leaders of the modern civil rights movement, they were students at the HBCU’s shaped by this Rankin Network. There they learned a faith that demanded social action, the philosophy of nonviolence, and the hope that movements could change what seemed immovable. When he was martyred in 1968 after becoming the most recognizable moral leader of the 20th century America, Dr. King was eulogized by his mentor and college President – one of the handful of people who’d been at that initial seminar in 1931 – Dr. Benjamin Mays….
Trump decided on war with Iran after secret Israeli pitch, New York Times reports
[Drop Site Daily, April 8, 2026]
President Donald Trump authorized strikes on Iran following a February 11 Situation Room meeting in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appearing alongside Mossad chief David Barnea and military officials, presented a four-part regime-change pitch that included a video montage of potential replacement leaders such as Reza Pahlavi, the New York Times reported Tuesday. Netanyahu argued Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed within weeks, that the regime would be too weakened to close the Strait of Hormuz, and that Mossad-fomented street protests combined with a Kurdish ground front from Iraq could trigger an uprising. Trump’s immediate response was reported as: “Sounds good to me.” Vice President JD Vance was absent, stranded in Azerbaijan. U.S. intelligence officials pushed back sharply the following day. Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe called the regime-change scenario “farcical,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “bullshit,” and General Dan Caine told the president the Israelis routinely “oversell” plans that are “not always well-developed,” the Times reported. War Secretary Pete Hegseth was described as the strongest proponent of immediate action.
Here’s A List Of Gulf Energy Infrastructure Damaged In Iran War
[Bloomberg, April 12, 2026, via gCaptain]
