Dem
47
GOP
53
The gauntlet has officially been thrown down, as Harvard University has sued the Trump administration for freezing $2 billion in funding, despite the fact that the money had already been awarded, with contracts signed. Note that this suit is separate from one filed by a group representing part of the Harvard faculty and staff.
Harvard is, of course, a formidable foe. The university can draw on its faculty, its alumni, or both in putting together a legal "dream team." It also has resources that are, in effect, unlimited. There's not only $2 billion in existing funding on the line here, there's also the damage that yanking the funding will do, there's future funding, there's the potential costs of the administration yanking Harvard's tax-exempt status, and the potential costs of the administration interfering with the matriculation of foreign students. It would not be crazy to put the total potential price tag here at $10 billion (or more). Under such circumstances, Harvard could pay its attorneys $100,000/hour for 10,000 hours of legal work, plus give them suites at the Ritz Carlton, plus buy them each a Gulfstream G500 to fly around in, plus serve them daily meals of Maine lobster, Beluga caviar, Cristal Champagne, and authentic Kobe beef steaks dusted with saffron and white truffles, and it would still make complete economic sense.
Of course, the federal government is also a formidable foe... at least, normally. But at this point, allow us to quote something we wrote back when this Harvard story first broke:
Forgive us for using this concept so frequently today, but the 5-page, single-spaced letter [of demands being made of Harvard] reads like a fascist wet dream. You get the impression that various members of the Trump administration sat in a room, came up with every possible demand they could think of, and then put it ALL in, regardless of how plausible, how reasonable, or how legal the demand might be... It is unbelievable that any government official would make such demands verbally, as all of these things are clearly illegal. It is even more unbelievable that any government official would actually WRITE THE DEMANDS DOWN, memorializing them for all to see.
We did not actually expect this but, as it turns out, we were dangerously close to the truth. According to reporting from The New York Times, that letter was not supposed to be sent out. It was the result, for lack of a better term, of some sort of brainstorming session. The notion was that it would be revised, and then a decision would be made as to whether or not to move forward. However, someone (and nobody is saying who) sent it out, apparently of their own volition. At that point, the administration was committed (which is appropriate, since many of its members should BE committed). One unnamed White House spokesman, who spoke to the Times, even had the temerity to claim this was all Harvard's fault, and that the university should have realized the letter was an opening bid, and should have picked up the phone and started negotiating.
As Sam Stein points out in a piece for The Bulwark, the fears that Trump v2.0 would be just as Trumpy, but way more competent, were clearly overblown. He writes:
This is not a smooth-running operation. Indeed, the extent to which Trump's first three months back in office have been characterized by mistakes—from bumbling embarrassments to calamitous errors endangering national security—is frankly breathtaking.
Weeks before the White House's antisemitism task force sent an "unauthorized" letter to Harvard making demands so onerous (such as federal oversight of admissions) that university leaders felt compelled to publicly fight it, Trump officials acknowledged they mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.
Weeks before that, the White House conceded that top national security officials had erroneously added the editor of the Atlantic to a Signal chat where they discussed war plans.
In the middle of all that, economists at the American Enterprise Institute noted that the tariff formula the president was applying to dozens of countries had a massive mathematical flaw in plain sight, while penguins in the Indian Ocean were dismayed to learn that the tariffs were targeting them.
[And] those were [just] the main-course screwups.
So, it's just as much of a clown show as last time around. A very dangerous clown show, but a clown show nonetheless. And so, our money is on Harvard, and also on most or all of the folks who will eventually get their days in court. (Z)