Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
The fired head of the U.S. Copyright Office is fighting back against the Trump administration’s recent attempt to seize control of the Library of Congress, which, as the name suggests, is a legislative branch agency.
As TPM has reported, Democrats in the House have already taken some action to raise the alarm after President Trump abruptly fired the Librarian of Congress and then, days later, the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, which is part of the library. Republican leadership, somewhat surprisingly, has even nodded in the direction of acknowledging that Trump’s actions concerning the agency embedded within the legislative branch might not be lawful.
Trump fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden earlier this month. A few days later the White House fired the director of the copyright office, Shira Perlmutter and the Justice Department announced that one of Trump’s closest allies in the DOJ would replace Hayden as acting librarian.
The moves are, of course, just one of many actions Trump’s executive branch has taken to seize power from the other branches of government that are meant to serve as a check on the President’s authority. Questions around whether Trump is allowed to fire anyone in the Library of Congress or the U.S. Copyright Office — let alone replace them with his cronies in an acting capacity — are genuinely murky. Trump’s rationale for the overreach is likely threefold, as I see it:
- Trump, and those around him, are hellbent on testing the limits of his ability to defy the legislative and judicial branches’ authority.
- Undermining free thought, ransacking education and attacking academia has emerged as a running theme of his second term.
- The Trump administration and Republicans generally have emerged as opponents of any effort to check the power of the burgeoning AI industry, or to contend with the threats it poses to intellectual property, education, critical thinking, etc. Just days before Trump abruptly fired Perlmutter, the U.S. Copyright Office had put out a report that was critical of the use of copyrighted material in training generative AI.
Perlmutter’s lawsuit names the following Trump allies as defendants: Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer and current deputy attorney general who he wants to name as Hayden’s replacement, Sergio Gor, the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office and Paul Perkins, who Trump wants to replace Perlmutter as register of copyrights.
In the suit, she argues that only the Librarian of Congress legally has the power to remove the register of copyrights, not the President, and that the Federal Vacancies Reform Act — which the Trump White House is using to justify their power grab — only applies to executive branch agencies.
The key excerpt from Perlmutter’s lawsuit:
The Administration’s attempts to remove Ms. Perlmutter as the Register of Copyrights are blatantly unlawful. Congress vested the Librarian of Congress—not the President—with the power to appoint, and therefore to remove, the Register of Copyrights.
Accordingly, the President’s attempt to remove Ms. Perlmutter was unlawful and ineffective. Nor can Ms. Perlmutter be removed by Mr. Blanche, whom the President purported to appoint as acting Librarian of Congress. The President has no authority to name a temporary replacement Librarian of Congress, much less name a high-ranking DOJ official whose presence offends the constitutional separation of powers. Although Congress has authorized the President through the Federal Vacancies Reform Act to temporarily fill vacant, high-level positions in an “Executive agency,” it has not authorized the President to fill temporary vacancies elsewhere, including, as relevant here, the Library of Congress. Instead, Congress chose to authorize the Librarian of Congress to “make rules and regulations for the government of the Library,” and, pursuant to those rules, interim Principal Deputy Librarian Robert R. Newlen now exercises the powers of the acting Librarian of Congress.
And so, another attempt at accountability for Trump’s relentless attack on the separation of powers outlined in the Constitution arrives before the courts.
— Nicole Lafond
Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:
- Kate Riga discusses Democrats’ increasingly disastrous tendency to hold on to power until it is too late.
- Josh Kovensky shares a theory as to why a bipartisan bill meant to place some soft-touch regulations on crypto has not yet passed the Senate. Hint: It’s got something to do with Trump’s own crypto schemes.
- Emine Yücel weighs in on the shocking news this week that RFK Jr. doesn’t think he’ll be able to find the cause of autism by September after all.
Let’s dig in.
Politicians Need To Stop Making Us Wrangle With Their Private Suffering
Days after Joe Biden released his aggressive prostate cancer diagnosis and hours after Rep. Gerry Connolly’s (D-VA) office announced his death, those on the left are wrestling with a familiar knot of feelings: empathy for the suffering of the men and their families, and frustration that the end of their lives is defined by an insistence on grasping power, no matter the ramifications of doing so in their diminished and declining state.
I experienced this most personally a few years ago, when I was covering a round of Senate Judiciary hearings. The late Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) was still the chair, shortly before her death in office. The committee had taken a brief recess, and I was headed to the bathroom. I ended up behind Feinstein and a staff member who was physically supporting her as she walked down the hallway and telling her, in the tone of a loving caregiver, that she only had one round of questioning to go and that the staffer had prepared a snack to make sure her blood sugar levels didn’t dip.
Feinstein’s diminishment was on clear display by that point. Reporters let her walk by unmolested in the hallways, feeling that peppering her with the daily gamut of questions was something akin to abuse. People on the left had started clamoring for her to step down as chair.
It’s profoundly uncomfortable to meet human suffering with political recriminations. But it’s also required when those suffering refuse to turn over the keys of this country’s leadership while in the throes of it.
Connolly ran to be the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, citing his seniority — and despite his ongoing struggle with esophageal cancer — sidelining Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), claiming one of the few positions of messaging power the minority has at a time when Democrats are consistently drowned out.
Biden’s misdeeds on this front are numerous and more profound, in line with the power of the office he sought and held. His seeking of a second term, perhaps even his seeking of a first term — where party leadership and the pandemic helped him notch a victory he didn’t have to perform for — displayed a wrongheaded conviction that communication skills, as candidate and as president, lag far behind governing talents in importance.
I know many Democrats who felt acute pain watching a man many of them felt great affection for crumple under his age, to be browbeaten out of the race three months before the election. He left his vice president an impossible task, and has regularly disrespected her since she failed to pull it off.
The last eight lawmakers who died in office were Democrats. Three of them died this year, just as the party is having an ongoing debate about how to confront Trump and, relatedly, the gerontocracy of its leadership.
There are human reasons that these lawmakers struggle to give up their positions of power and relevance, to resign themselves to their twilight years in a country that disrespects and disregards its elderly. But voters elected them to serve the public, not to cling to power until their bodies literally give out from under them.
Many liberals find Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) to be disappointing, or at least anachronistic — too mild, too amiable, too enamored with bipartisanship to be an effective steward of the committee Feinstein was forced to give up (Durbin also snatched the gavel from Sheldon Whitehouse, a more punacious colleague). But, at the very least, Durbin saved us from this experience. We won’t have to play doctor with a diagnosis, track the slowing of his gait, cringe at his increasing confusion, treat him, a man with unusual power and privilege, with kid gloves.
By bowing out — granted, at the advanced age of 80 — he has chosen to age in private, ideally, even with grace. More Democrats should follow his lead. And if they won’t, at least some of them will be forced out through the political process, a painful end to many careers that were initially premised on serving and bettering the country.
— Kate Riga
Why Not Thursday?
On the GOP side, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) has taken the lead on crypto. She’s appeared at events with industry CEOs, she’s sponsored the leading legislation aimed at regulating the industry with a light touch. She even combined crypto boosterism with MAGA fealty by introducing a bill that would codify Trump’s idea of a strategic crypto reserve.
Her analogue on the Democratic side has largely been Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), though Gillibrand’s been joined in her more muted-but-still-substantial show of support by Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), and Ruben Gallego (D-AZ).
Gillibrand and Lummis appeared at an event this month hosted by a crypto advocacy coalition where they traded praise over the GENIUS Act, the first major crypto regulatory bill under real consideration by Congress, and offered expectations of its passage. Both expected it to pass; Lummis offered a timeframe: by Memorial Day. The audience cheered.
But Memorial Day no longer seems to be the plan. The Senate goes into recess next week. After clearing a key procedural vote this week, the GENIUS Act is not yet law. There may be any number of reasons for that, but one Senate interlocutor of mine offered an entertaining theory: last night, Trump held a dinner for the top holders of his personal coin, $TRUMP. It would have looked too unseemly to pass a bill that will allow him to enrich himself further in crypto within a few days of his buck-raking dinner.
— Josh Kovensky
Turns Out RFK Can’t Find The Cause Of Autism By September
Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is casually walking back his big promise: that he and his team would find out the cause of autism by September.
(Cue in Cilla Black) Surprise! Surprise!
RFK Jr. says the new deadline would be sometime in March of next year.
“We will have some studies completed by September, and those studies will mainly be replication studies of studies that have already been done,” the HHS Secretary told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins this week. “We’re also deploying new teams of scientists, 15 groups of scientists. We’re going to send those grants out to bid within three weeks.”
RFK Jr. added that he thinks replication studies will be finalized around six months after September.
“As I said, we’re going to begin to have a lot of information by September. We’re not going to stop the studies in September,” he added. “We’re going to be definitive. And the more definitive you are, the more it drives public policy.”
That’s rich from the guy who already, without any proof, claimed earlier this year that rising rates of autism are caused by “environmental toxins” in food and medicine.
— Emine Yücel
