r/centrist

In breaking news former Democrat and head of national intelligence has stepped down citing helping her husband as he fights bone cancer.

What do you all think?

Republican House leaders unexpectedly canceled a scheduled vote on a War Powers Resolution aimed at forcing President Donald Trump to halt the unauthorized military conflict in Iran or secure explicit congressional approval.

The article says DOE’s Environmental Management office lost around one-third of its staff in fiscal 2025, with most leaving through the “deferred resignation program,” a Trump administration policy where employees sat on paid administrative leave for months and months before being officially terminated.

DOGE wasn’t just outright firings. There were also deferred resignation programs and buyouts, which were basically pressure campaigns that pushed federal workers out under threat of being fucking fired later if they didn't accept. The piece also says those departures left nearly half the office vacant and hit mission-critical safety and engineering roles hard:

>Nearly half of the positions in the federal government’s office responsible for handling and cleaning up nuclear waste are currently vacant, according to a new audit, after the Trump administration incentivized a wave of departures at the agency. 

>GAO found Environmental Management faced challenges in cleaning up nuclear waste due to understaffing, as it forced schedule delays, cost overruns and workplace accidents. At its 15 clean up sites, the Energy office is tasked with deactivating contaminated buildings, remediating contaminated soil and operating facilities that treat millions of gallons of liquid radioactive waste.  At its location in the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the office has a vacancy rate of 62%. 

If DOGE was around during Oppenheimer's days, they would have ruled the Manhattan project was a "waste" and he would have been fucking fired and cut off before the work was finished. Engineers are likely serving coffee at starbucks instead of safeguarding our nation's nuclear waste because they were DOGE'd.

The mass firings were not normal management. They were ideologically driven, illegal and destructive. That should have demanded a stronger response, but why have Democrats done nothing about it? I am a single issue voter about these illegal terminations. If Dems want my vote in the midterms there should be:

• hearings,
• investigations,
• and some kind of restoration/reinstatement effort

All they've done so far is write some strongly worded letters.

Summary:

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is launching a recurring livestream series called “Talk with the People,” centered on Twitch and also streamed across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and Bluesky. The show will let him answer public questions live through Twitch chat, with Mamdani framing it as a way to make City Hall more accessible, especially to younger residents. The series is presented as a modern version of older direct-to-public political communication, drawing inspiration from Mayor LaGuardia’s 1940s radio show “Talk to the People.”

My take:

I love this. We need more elected officials engaging with the public directly instead of just performatively stoking the flames on social media. I am curious about the format and how they will manage the crowd that will inevitably show up, but I hope it goes well and will probably check it out tonight.

What do you think? Is this a modern version of the old fireside chat idea, or is Twitch too chaotic for that comparison? Is anything better than nothing?

Edit: It has since broadcast here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2777600599

Now that I have had time to truly review the entirety of the "case" here, I have a few thoughts to share on it for those who enjoy the finer details on things.

1. The first item is really whether or not Trump had a real "legal hook" in the first place to bring a suit, even if he were not President. I.e., if Trump were just a standard Plaintiff in this case who had never been President at all, is there anything here. To answer that question, we have to look at the statute he sued under. § 7431(a)(1), which relies on interpretations by IRS officers and employees of §6103, grants a form of compensable damages. However, it is cabined to actions related to IRS officers and employees. Littlejohn, who no one disputes in this case "stole and leaked data without authorization" was a contractor at the time, not an officer or even an employee. In summary, Trump has a "factual hook" sank in regarding his tax documents having been leaked, but there is no "legal hook" in the sense that the relevant statute their legal theory of the case was presented under does not expose the US government to any lawsuits at all.
2. If Littlejohn were an employee and not a contractor, does that change anything in this case? First of all, most likely not. The statute in question is quite narrow, and would cover a rather specific scenario where an IRS employee "knowingly did something that violates procedures in §6103" as part of their duties on the job. However, this is not actually what happened. What did happen is that Littlejohn stole the information and exfiltrated it, which was a criminal matter and the DOJ pursued him as a criminal. This was not that Littlejohn received an open records request at CNN and erroneously answered it with a full tax return, in violation of §6103. Rather, Littlejohn was acting completely outside of the scope of any official duty or capacity at the IRS at all, in a criminal way, and nothing in §7431(a)(1) actually creates a liability for the US government in that scenario at all. Trump could plausibly argue that this is still a problem of supervision, of failure to safeguard his data, of improper processes and procedures at the IRS. However, if he does that, he has fully left the statute he tried to sue under behind, because that statute is not about data security, data privacy, or poor management of the agency. There is no remedy for anyone, anywhere in the world for those issues.
3. Trump is suing for 10 billion dollars, but §7431(a)(1) is narrow and cabined to specific types of actual damages. Whether or not punitive damages could be available is another question to be asked between the adversaries of the case and receive rulings to that effect, but most often not when you are suing the US government in district court. Punitive damages under these facts would not be anywhere near 10 billion dollars if they come into being. This is quite a good barometer that the statute they are relying upon to file a suit has little to do with the case they are seeking to prosecute. In fact, it appears that Trump's actual theory is an "omnibus" theory of a weaponized government, sent after him in particular by his political foe or foes. There is no liability for the US government in that kind of case. That type of case does not exist, and the government would need to do little (or nothing) to defend against it except to say "you are not entitled to damages at all here, and even if you were, you are not trying your case with clean hands when seeking to attach 10 billion dollars in damages to a §7431 case, as the statute is narrow and does not cover 99% of the damages you seek compensation for, including reputational, political, etc."
4. There are no adversaries before the court. If you only take one thing away from this, it is that under the Trump admin's widely adopted legal theory of "unitary executive," these hypothetical swim lanes between various executive agencies and the Oval Office do not exist in any way. If you read §7431, it dictates that litigants go to a US District Court (an Article III court) to try their case. This is a problem for Trump in this case that consumes the entire case before it can start. That is, everyone who can put forth a legal theory to defend the US government in this case answers to Trump. This functionally means that there is no adversity in the case, there are no adversaries here to petition for anything, or respond to anything, or for that matter to even have hearings before a judge. The thing actually stopping the case from being moot is that Trump does not have the authority to write himself a 10 billion dollar check to satisfy his own lawsuit. And so, this case exists only as a way to short-circuit that problem of not having any power over the federal purse to pay his own claim.

Remaining questions are whether or not a "settlement," especially one that involved such convoluted concessions as to award almost 2 billion in monetary damages to parties who were never part of litigation or before the court in this case at all, and had the dramatic addendum shielding Trump and hundreds of his associates from IRS audits in broad ways can actually "exist." I mean, I know that this is a confounding question for some, because the DOJ says this settlement exists, they did a "press release" about it, etc. However, the actual root of the settlement (the litigation that led to it) is not, for the reasons discussed above, actually "real" and we will have to "wait and see" if anyone indeed benefits from it either financially or legally in the case of it shielding against any actual IRS actions against Trump, his two co-litigants in the case (his sons) or especially the people who were never parties to the litigation or before the court.

This whole “daycare fraud” in MN story broke months ago when Nick Shirley posted a video claiming there was widespread fraud amongst these child care facilities. At the time, I read many comments on Reddit claiming this was a known office and Gov. Walz was aware of it and had been looking into it. Then as the story grew it seemed like that take on Resddit shifted to “Shirley made everything up, it’s all a lie by conservatives.”

I now see a woman has been charged in the case, but it seems like it’s only conservative outlets that are covering this. Is there truth to this story? And is this just another example of news outlets only covering what they deem as “good vs bad news” for their side?

A good article providing an update to the conflict in Gaza.

There is concern that the war is becoming overlooked and forgotten in the wake of world attention of the war in Iran.

The IDF remains in control of large portions of Gaza with fire fights claiming hundreds of lives during the ceasefire.

Hamas has yet to disarm which is leading to a stalemate that has some worried the IDF will continue to fortify territory in Gaza for the foreseeable future, noting that according to the ceasefire, their military is not obligated to withdraw while Hamas remains armed and active.

What do you all think?