Good morning. It is February 11th. It is cold and gray 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. 

Pope Francis put out a letter this morning, addressed to the bishops of the United States, but directed at ostentatious Catholic convert Vice President, JD Vance and the rest of Donald Trump's administration. The subject is migration and the moral obligation to help the vulnerable and the absolute conflict between the escalating brutality of Donald Trump's rhetoric and policy toward migrant people and the fundamental principles of right and wrong. The purpose of the letter the Pope wrote was to emphasize “the permanent recognition of the dignity of every human being without exception.”

In fact, the pope wrote “when we speak of infinite and transcendent dignity, we wish to emphasize that the most decisive value possessed by the human person surpasses and sustains every other judicial consideration that can be made to regulate life in society. The consideration of the most fragile, unprotected and vulnerable,” the pope writes, “does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration. However,” he writes, “this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others. What is built on the basis of force and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being begins badly and will end badly.” Earlier, J.D. Vance in his chosen vocation of posting on X.com had attempted to wriggle out of these basic moral premises by telling someone who noted Jesus Christ's explicit teaching of the duty to love a stranger that they should Google Ordo Amoris and thereby be informed that actually some people are more important than other people and that when Jesus Christ said to love your neighbor as yourself, he really meant you're supposed to love your family more than your neighbor and your friends less than your family, but more than the people who live near you who aren't your friends and the people who live near you more than the people who are further away and so on until you're pitching tents for a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.

Vance also managed to throw something in there about how people who think they have high IQs should listen to the people who really have higher IQs than them. From the lesser known part of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus told the parable of the calipers, all of that is expressly rejected in the Pope's letter. Well, not the IQ part, which is too dumb to even deal with. But for the benefit of Vance and whoever in his TradCath group chat sold him on anti-Christian doctrine,

Pope writes, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. And the true Ordo Amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan, Luke 10, 25 to 37. That is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all without exception.” As a Protestant, albeit the incense burning kind of Protestant, I’m bemused to see that papal authority apparently needs to be applied to get a Yale law graduate to understand the straightforward meaning of the plain text of the words of Jesus, but it's not as if American Protestants are doing such a great job with it either. 

Speaking of resorting to appeals to authority to make a very straightforward observation, on the front of this morning's New York Times, the second story from the right is “Trump Causes Constitutional Crisis, Scholars Say.”

“There is no universally accepted definition of a constitutional crisis,” Adam Liptak writes “but legal scholars agree about some of its characteristics. It is generally the product of presidential defiance of laws and judicial rulings. It is not binary: It is a slope not a switch. It can be cumulative and once one starts it can get much worse. It can also” Liptak continues “‘be obvious,’ said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
‘We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now,’ he said on Friday. ‘There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.’”

If you want to skip the scholars sign off, you can go to the top of the page where the five column headline is “A Showdown Emerges Over the Limits of Presidential Power.” The subhead is “Judge Says Trump Violated Order on Funding.” As usual, the Times comes at the unpleasant and disturbing facts sideways, if not upside down, and as abstractly as possible. The headline amounts to one of those big, extra thick moving blankets draped over the news to prevent anyone from bumping into its hard edges. The situation is not that a showdown has “emerged on its own. As the subhead says, the news is that a judge says that the president violated a judicial order. I would say the sub headline belongs up top as the headline, except “judge says Trump violated order on funding,” still operates it in order of removal. The news is that the funding is still not there. That's a reportable fact. The president has been directly ordered to release funds and he has not released the funds. But a judge confirms that Trump has done this and says that it is illegal is an important piece of confirmation of the primary fact. but the principal actor here is Trump, not the judge. The lead is “A federal judge on Monday said
the White House has defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump White House was disobeying a judicial mandate.” What makes this story worth five columns across the top of page one is not the incremental escalation of discourse on the judges side but the categorical noncompliance on the president's side. 

Just above the fold in dialogue with the adjoining piece, the story says “An outright refusal to comply with the judicial branch’s constitutional oversight authority could be considered a constitutional crisis.” It's funny which abstractions you get to state plainly as facts and which ones you have to hedge around. The existence of a showdown or the emergence of a showdown. Whatever a “showdown” may be, is a declarative fact, but a “constitutional crisis,” despite simply being a more specifically articulated version of showdown, is only something that a disembodied someone could consider to be at hand. 

On the subject of outright constitutional crisis, the next column over is, “Justice Official Pushes to Drop Case on Adams,” as yesterday's newsletter covered. Emile Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, ordered prosecutors to drop their fraud and corruption cases against New York Mayor Eric Adams, continuing the Trump administration's program blessed by the Supreme Court of keeping the presidential pardon power in his pocket and accomplishing the same results through selective prosecutions and non-prosecutions for ulterior motives. In this case, Bove pretty much wrote the motives down. But the majority in Trump versus the United States specifically held that the president's motives are absolutely immune from being considered when he is using or choosing to abuse his official powers of office. 

In other activity under that umbrella on page a 19, the headline is “Justice Department's tone signals a campaign of intimidation against prosecutors.” Stories about how department leadership from Attorney General Pam Bondi on down is threatening people who placed the department's traditional independence ahead of loyalty to Trump. 

On the facing page to that is a profile of Emil Bove, who the paper calls the Trump administration's enforcer. Things are much more blunt inside the paper than on the front of it. 

On the page before that, Elon Musk's assault on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gets the headline, “White House undermines watchdog for consumers.” Accurate. 

The headline next to that concedes a little too much. “Efficiency team can skirt open records laws,” it says. What it means is that the White House is attempting to classify Elon Musk's roving demolition team in a way that would make it immune to public records requests. But that's going to end up in court. 

On the page before that, at the top is a news analysis. “Guardrails gone. Trump embraces a new ideology, power.” In which Peter Baker pieces together retrospectively what was prospectively always going to be the case about the administration, namely that in his four years out of office, Trump purged his circle of anyone who cares about laws. So the kind of people who used to talk him out of trying to abolish birthright citizenship or seize the Panama Canal are gone, Baker writes, “replaced by Elon Musk and a crew of far-right crusaders who were cheering him.” 

And below that, there's a Maggie Haberman piece, “A third term as president. Some allies push the idea.” 

“Eight days after he won a second term, Mr. Trump, whose supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, in an effort to prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory from being certified, mused about whether he could have a third presidential term, which is barred by the Constitution. Since then, he has floated the idea frequently.” And here is where the journalistic access kicks in. “In public,” Haberman writes, “he couches the notion of staying in office beyond two terms as a humorous aside. In private, Mr. Trump has told advisors that it is just one of his myriad diversions to grab attention and irritate Democrats, according to people familiar with his comments. And he has made clear that he is happy to be passed a grueling campaign in which he faced two assassination attempts.”—No, he didn't. The guy they found lurking in the bush with a gun did not attempt an assassination—“and followed an aggressive schedule in the final weeks.” What's the point of having anonymous insiders put out the message that what Trump says in public about violating the Constitution and holding on to power is just a gambit? As the news analysis piece on the page above it makes clear so far, if you want to know what Trump is going to do, you should listen to what Trump says he's going to do. And if you want to know what Trump is not going to do, you should read the Constitution. 

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 through your subscription dollars and tips. Please keep them coming if you can. And if no unexpected difficulties crop up, we will talk again tomorrow.