Chris Johnson

I’m tired, I’m stealing this from Miguel.

Sorry Miggy.

This case started in the United States District Court (D.D.C.) This is the court that covers Washington, D.C.

Two cases were brought AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition v. United States Department of State and Global Health Council v. Trump. Docket Number: 25-cv-400 and 25-cv-402.

The two cases were filed in the same court at nearly the same time.

After the district court issued their TRO, the Trump administration appealed to the D.C. Circuit court.

The state’s motion is better than I expected. My expectation was that this was going to be a full throated attack based on Article II standing and authorizations.

The state goes on to point out that the court’s order requires them to pay all invoices and drawn-down requests even if those payments are not due, have not had normal vetting done (was the work done), have not been checked against the statement of work, or that these bills are legitimate in any way.

The state also points out that there is no court record (it is not in the record) of the bills that the plaintiffs (bad guys) want paid.

Of note, the state (the good guys), are pushing that this is a constitutional issue.

When a case is appealed at the district level, it is appealed to the Circuit court. It is very unusual to skip directly to the Supreme Court. This was done.

The state did appeal to the Circuit court. They were intending on dorking around to force the state to either pay the $2 billion or to directly violate the district court’s order. When the state filed with the Supreme Court, they informed the Circuit Court, which then issued their opinion.

There is a guideline in the court system that says that TROs cannot be appealed. This does not stop the state (as bad guys) from appealing TROs that go against them. This happened in —Miguel Gonzalez, The Zelenskyy Drama, Miguel’s Substack (Feb. 28, 2025).

The Circuit court was unwilling because the state (good guys) didn’t appeal the TRO when it was not as intrusive. The Circuit claims that this means the TRO can’t be appealed. They cited to Dellinger v. Bessent which is another case where the rogue inferior court decided that they could order the president around.

Before the midnight deadline, Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay.

I was surprised there was not more yelling about a single judge (Justice) doing this. But that could be because even the leftest understood that screaming about a single justice stopping a single judge might undermine their position.

An administrative stay is issued before any briefings on the merits have taken place. They are issued when there is a possibility of a whip-lash situation. We saw this in the Duncan case out of California.

The district court issued a final judgment saying that California’s ban on magazines was unconstitutional. This happened before Bruen. This led to what is known as “freedom week” when millions of magazines flooded into California. The state appealed to the Ninth Circus, which then put a stay on the judgment, stopping freedom week.

When the same judge found that California’s magazine ban was still unconstitutional, post Bruen, he issued his final judgment and then put a 30-day administrative stay on his judgment.

The state did appeal. The Ninth Circus did issue a stay. There was no Freedom Week II.

The Chief Justice has ordered the parties to have all briefings in by noon today. The Supreme Court will then issue their order regarding vacating or staying the TRO. That will likely happen on Monday.

Question of the week?

Are you tired of winning yet? Is this what you voted for?

My mentor was a federal employee. He, and his team, worked odd hours. I would put in my 8 hours as a contractor and then go to his lab and work with him and his team until midnight or later.

Somewhere along the way, people noticed that his team didn’t have set hours and raised a fuss. They complained to the IG that he and his team were mis-reporting their hours.

This led to the IG sending people to investigate.

Now, this was in a secured area. During normal hours, you could just walk in after you should your badge. After hours, you had to sign in and out.

What this meant was that his team had security logs showing when they left for the night. And with a bit of work, they also had the time when people got to work.

After a thorough investigation, they found that yes, the team was misreporting their hours.

They were underreporting by 10 to 15 hours per week.

For me, it didn’t make any difference. I was on salary to the contractor. The time I spent with my mentor, working on projects for the government, were not billable hours. I didn’t care. I learned astonishing things.

Our system administrators were a pair of very sharp ladies. They arrived on time and they left on time. During their 8 hours, they worked constantly. I never felt like they gave less than 100%. When they needed to work late, they did.

Others I worked with were the same way. They gave their 8 hours and left. We got what we were paying for.

Some scientists over worked too.

Then there were the “slackers”. They arrived at work exactly on time. They went to their desks, were seen, then went to the restroom for their morning dump. This lasted anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes.

Subsequently, they went and did a bit of work before it was time for morning break. After the morning break, they had a pee smoke break. Then lunch, then a bit of work, then home, exactly on time.

Total time working, maybe an hour and a half.

A former friend worked for the state government. He was proud of the fact that he got paid for 8 hours of work per day, but on a normal day, he only spent about 2 hours working. The rest of the time he was doing own time projects/stuff.

Now, sometimes people look like they are cheating, but they aren’t really.

We had a group of scientists that looked lazy. They would get to work and sit around talking, reading the paper, for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or two. Then they would get busy pouring over results for a couple of hours. Then they would have another long gab session.

After that, they would spend a bit of time putzing with their program before telling the program to “run”.

They would twiddle their thumbs doing nothing until quitting time.

They were incredibly productive. They submitted a run before they left for the day. That would run overnight. If they had the parameters right, the run would complete shortly after they got to work. They would then analyze the results and submit the next run.

On Fridays, they would submit jobs that would run all weekend long. That made Mondays look like they were goofing off for an extended time as they waited for the runs to complete.

Their work was so important that it justified a major computer upgrade. The new computer was 4 times as fast. What used to take them 16 hours of run time now only took 4 hours. They should now be able to get two or three runs per day done.

Nope. With the faster computer, they were able to get more detailed results in the same 16-hour run time. They adjusted to the increased speed by answering more of the question more accurately.

All of this is to say, when I see former federal employees screaming about being fired, my heart gives a little thump of happiness. If they are good or needed, they will be rehired. In the meantime, learn to code. I hear COBOL is a good choice.

People have a difficult time making hard choices.

The Trolley Problem brings is one of the ways that we explore ethical choices. The general premises are that there are five people that will die if you do nothing. There is one person, who is currently safe, who can be sacrificed to save the five.

Do you do nothing and let five people die, or do you throw the switch and kill the one?

What if we change the problem statement a little, what if the one was a child? What if the one was a woman? What if the one was a “person of color”? What if it was your wife?

Now take that same list of changes and insert it into the five. What if one of the five was a child, a woman, a person of color, your wife?

Ok. How about if your daughter was the one and your son was one of the five?

The problem hasn’t changed, but the emotional stress is greatly increased.

Politicians know this. They use it to their advantage.

The term is “Emotional Blackmail.”

Consider the following dilemma, you can choose to pay more in taxes or the school system’s proposed budget is capped at a half million increase rather than the 3.5 million increase they were asking for.

For me, that’s an easy choice. Cap at a 0.5 million increase. At which point the emotional blackmail begins.

“If you don’t give use the extra three million dollars, we will have to fire teachers.”

Is that really the only choice?

That is the question I posed a teacher. What other things in the budget can be cut, before we have to fire teachers.

Now, I’ve been told that I’m against teachers. That I oppose her. Why? Because I don’t want to cut teachers?

For her, there are only two choices, pay or cut teachers. If I don’t want to pay more in taxes, I must hate teachers and want them fired.

So I asked her about programs in the budget that could be cut instead. In our first iteration, there were no programs she was willing to cut.

The problem she has is that every cut is equally bad. Every choice is equally bad. Since all the choices are bad, the only option is to get the 3 million dollars out of the stone of taxpayers.

We had a similar issue at a family level years ago. We had a 16k windfall. We all agreed we would put that money into the homestead. The problem was that nobody could agree on what we should do.

Should we get new siding for the house? Should we replace one of the vehicles? Should we pay off a loan?

It wasn’t even that simple, there were about a dozen different projects or expenses we were considering.

By default, humans will spiral rather than make a hard decision.

I had to listen to people tell me that project A was more important than project B, but B was more important than C. And C was more important than A.

It was a circle. Everything was more important than everything else.

The first process was having everybody create an ordered list of by importance.

They couldn’t do it. They all had situations where they had multiple things with equal importance. Or worse still, some couldn’t do it because they couldn’t choose.

The method that did work was creating binary choices.

We lay out a grid, in that grid we compare every item to every other item, asking if item row was more important than the item in the column.

Once that grid is filled out, we can create an ordered list. Once we had ordered lists, we could present and come to an agreement as to what our priorities were.

From this table, we can create an ordered list

1. Roof
2. Foundation
3. Gutters
4. Siding
5. Paint
6. Truck
7. Car
8. Computer

The problem we have with our school budget is that every program is equally important. In the end, they will likely fire teachers and programs.

For my lady:

The order list for today has come out. Snope and Ocean State Tactical are distributed for conference this Friday.

They are still live.

Today’s order list was 58 pages, including 30 or so pages by Thomas in different cases. I’d say a hundred cases were closed out.

This looked like an end of term broom, sweeping out the crumbs. There were a couple of cases that were granted cert.

Things are on hold for our 2A cases until next Monday.

Whenever I see a motion for a TRO, Preliminary Injunction or a Stay, the opinion of the court always includes a reference to —Miguel Gonzalez, The Zelenskyy Drama, Miguel’s Substack (Feb. 28, 2025).

These are known as the “Winter Factors”. They must be addressed in order by the court before granting any of the above.

The first factor is the likelihood of success on the merits. Is the person requesting the TRO, PI or Stay going to win the case in the end? If it is more likely than not, then the first factor has been met.

The second factor is the question of the amount and type of harm being done. The key phrase is irreparable harm. In short, this means that the harm cannot be redressed by throwing money at it. All violations of Constitutionally protected rights are considered irreparable harm. You will never again have that opportunity at that moment of time with those people listening back again.

The third factor is the balance of equities. Who will be most harmed whether the motion is granted or not granted. If the motion being granted will force a business to close, while not granting it will impose an eyesore, the balance of equities’ favorers not granting the motion.

The final factor is what is in the best interest of the public. The public has no interest in enforcing unconstitutional laws. This always favors The People. The state will often argue that “keeping the public safe” is the correct scale to use for determining what is in the publics best interests.

The court did not use the Winter Factors.

And this is why she is using the Nken instead of Winter To be able to discount the likelihood of success because of the amount of harm. In other words, instead of having to prove they are likely to win on the merits, the plaintiffs have chosen to prove that they might be horribly harmed if some hypothetical comes true.

Yeah, that doesn’t make much sense to me.

IANAL. My opinion is that the first question to be resolved is if the APA law(s) passed by congress limiting the power of the President are constitutional. If they are not constitutional, then they must be vacated and there is no cause for the case.

Instead, the court assumes the APA overrides the authority granted to the President under the Constitution. She then turns the Winter standard on its head.

Even though the text reads To establish a likelihood of success on the merits, a plaintiff need not show that success is an absolute certainty. It need only make a showing that the probability of … prevailing is better than fifty percent.

The plaintiff bears the burden. Not the defendant. This judge says it is the States that bear the burden.

The gist of this is that the courts are planning to ignore the Constitutional issues as much as possible and instead base their opinions on laws that are unconstitutional.