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Fauci’s pardon may be the thing that convicts him; Trump finds the windows SCOTUS left open; Democrats made a monster and find the wolves they raised have opinions about the car keys; more.
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Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Already. Your roundup today includes: Rand Paul’s committee votes to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt after he took the Fifth one hundred and eleven times, which is a lot even by Senate standards; why the pardon that was supposed to save him may be the very thing that sinks him; the autopen, which has quietly become the most important lawyer in Washington; President Trump losing 6-3 at the Supreme Court and spending the next five weeks finding the windows; what a foreign couple actually pays for an American baby, itemized; moderate Democrats declaring war on their own voters and putting fifteen million dollars behind it; the Twitch streamer who now picks Senate nominees; a Wisconsin candidate who paid dues to a club she’d rather not discuss; and a caucus war over lapel pins. It turns out the Democrats built a monster in the basement, and this week it came upstairs.
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The best example of the Fauci preference cascade appeared in yesterday’s New York Times, which did not run with “Republicans pounce.” It did not quote his defenses in the headline. Instead, it flatly reported, “How Fauci Got to This Point and the Legal Peril He Faces.” The subheadline had zero sugar for the doctor. “The case is unique,” it observed, quarantining Fauci into a category of himself, “because of the tension between the Fifth Amendment and the reach of a presidential pardon.” It ended chillingly: “The potential consequences could be grave.”
The news, as you probably well know, was that Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and the Homeland Security Committee voted to hold Dr. Anthony “Science” Fauci in contempt for his arrogant and greedy performance of taking the fifth right after swearing to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” It literally took nanoseconds to break that vow.
I called him greedy, since he accepted an unprecedented global pardon, presidential forgiveness of what we can only imagine are so many crimes that they finally just threw their hands up in the air and said “dammit, just pardon everything.” But even though he was gifted with a universal pardon so broad it eclipses the only similar one an American —a president— ever received, he still kept his pie hole shut when it was time to answer a few real questions about why he spent so much time on his malignant, narcissistic musings about how much the celebrity class was fawning over him instead of solving the pandemic like he was being paid to do.
Sorry! I’m digressing again. Or possibly venting. Let’s get back on track.
The Times noted that Senator Paul is skipping the traditional next step: uselessly bringing a contempt resolution to the full Senate for a vote. Since there’s a filibuster-shaped hole in that plan, Paul promptly passed the committee decision to the DOJ, which is not required to, but legally maypursue the matter. (This end-around only works when a party controls all the branches, as Republicans do now.)
We’ll soon see whether the DOJ will decide to take out the trash.
🪳 “The potential consequences could be grave for Dr. Fauci,” the article repeated later in the story. Somewhat astonishingly, and a very bad sign for Fauci, the first legal expert the Times quoted was conservative Democrat law professor Jonathan Turley. “There are good-faith arguments that his pardon would afford him effective immunity,” Turley explained, which would thereby render Dr. Fauci ineligible for any Fifth Amendment protection.
Altogether, the legal experts seemed queasy about trying to predict what a DC court might do with Dr. Fauci’s refusal to testify. When pressed, they all guessed that Fauci will win, since to find otherwise means that invoking your Fifth Amendment rights against incriminating yourself can get you thrown in jail, which sort of defeats the whole purpose, if you think about it. At minimum, it’s pretty ironic.
But, as the Times correctly noted in its headline block (and then never mentioned again), Fauci’s case is unique. And in that sense, the good doctor has unique vulnerabilities that guarantee this case will reach OJ-levels of high drama.
🪳 It’s that dang unconditional pardon. It’s both a blessing and a curse. It looks great on paper— who wouldn’t want a pre-emptive, unconditional pardon? The problem is that kind of pardon has never been legally tested before, and the closest historical examples are ones Democrats don’t want to talk about. And right behind that, marching over the horizon, looms the dreadful mechanical profile of the Biden Autopen.
The argument goes like this: A valid pardon requires the president to know what offenses are being forgiven, so he can exercise genuine judgment about clemency. Blanket language covering “all federal offenses” during a broad period (see, e.g., Ford’s pardon of Nixon) fails this test if the president is unaware of the specific criminal acts. In 1866, SCOTUS said a pardon could issue before conviction or even before indictment, but has never blessed a pardon for a completely unknown or uncharged crime.
Constitutional scholars say doing that could violate a president’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Unconditional pre-emptive pardons look a lot like lawlessness. Indeed, in Old England, even Kings were barred from pardoning someone before a crime was committed, on the theory that it was too close to suspending laws altogether. Pre-emptive pardons create the appearance of impunity and suggest that certain allies are above the law.
And if there is one thing we all know for sure, it’s that no one is above the law.
🪳 On January 19th, 2021 —in the near aftermath of January 6th, on the day Trump 1.0’s term ended— Democrats fretted that before he left office, Trump might pardon himself pre-emptively and globally. At that time, natsec establishment organ Lawfare Media concluded that “pre-emptive pardons could backfire,” and “a potential recipient would be well-advised not to accept one:”
Can you hear that distant booming noise rolling across the political moors? It sounds a lot like Fauci’s pre-emptive pardon backfiring. So, adding another layer of irony to the lawfare lasagna, Fauci and his Democrat allies may be forced to defend the exact same type of pardon they decried when they were afraid Trump would do it. How’s that for hypocrisy?
Then there’s the vexing question of Auto-pardons. Article II vests the pardon power solely in “the President.” An autopen (a machine that reproduces a signature) is not the President. Nor are staffers who operated the infernal device that performed the physical act. Critics frame this as a dereliction of duty that fails the minimum requirements for a true exercise of the awesome constitutional pardon power.
Related is the Cabbage-patch problem. The Oversight Committee has already concluded that cognitive decline meant the President did not personally decide on or even know about many late-term pardons, including (especially) Fauci’s. Without contemporaneous evidence of presidential approval like a written directive or even a text or email, the autopen documents reflect staff decisions, not the President’s will— and would therefore be void. CNN, last October:
Assuming the DOJ proceeds with the referral (a good bet), Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment could put all these issues on the table. He may not only be fighting about whether taking the Fifth was proper or not. He may also have to defend the pardon itself, and from a position of weakness too, since if the pardon waseffective, then he shouldn’t have raised that defense in the first place.
It’s Catch-22, doc. You just opened the door.
This high-visibility case could easily bubble up to the Supreme Court, which could, if it wants, take the opportunity to “clarify” a few pardon rules. And the steady stream of Fauci disclosures suggest that Republicans have bigger game in view than a mere contempt ruling.
So, ironically, Fauci’s contempt case conceivably could wind up approving of Fauci’s use of the Fifth Amendment, but only by ruling that he wasn’t immunizedbecause his pardon is invalid. Which would be a complete Pyrrhic victory; Fauci could win the battle but lose the war.
Even though it sailed right past this legal analysis, that is why the Times called Fauci’s case “unique” and called the potential consequences “grave.” If so, Fauci dug his own.
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Also yesterday, unleashing the full force of its faux outrage, the Times reported, “Trump Signs Executive Orders Targeting Birthright Citizenship and ‘Birth Tourism.’”
Just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that President Trump’s previous efforts to end birthright citizenship via executive order were unconstitutional, the President is back at it. He signed two new executive orders yesterday aimed at limiting who gets automatic citizenship and cracking down on “birth tourism.”
“We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning birthright,” the President explained. “It was close, but a very, very unfortunate decision. So we’re making adjustments.”
For our respected Portland readers, ‘birth tourism’ is exactly what it sounds like: pregnant women flying to the United States on tourist visas, having a baby on American soil, and voila— instant American citizen. Apparently it’s become a whole cottage industry. There are agencies, packages, concierge services. There are probably even loyalty points cards.
“That’s not the way it was supposed to work,” Trump said. “It’s a disgrace. They’re buying their way in, and we’re not going to let it happen.”
The part that corporate media never quite manages to explain, because explaining it would require them to admit something they really don’t want to admit: this is how Trump always wins (TAW).
Maybe not every battle or skirmish. But the war? The man never quits. The Supreme Court slammed the door on his first birthright citizenship order back on June 30th, in the 6-3 ruling he called “a very, very unfortunate decision.” Most politicians would have held a press conference, declared a moral victory, and moved on to something easier. Trump started finding the windows.
The TAW meme isn’t a meme. It’s a methodology.
🔥 The two new orders are genuinely clever— a fact the Times buried under its hand-wringing about enforceability. Rather than swinging at the 14th Amendment again with a sledgehammer, Trump’s lawyers went looking for cracks in the wall. They found two.
First: children of foreign government staff serving in the United States. These are people here on diplomatic or official status — not immigrants, not tourists, not residents. Their kids, under the new order, don’t get automatic citizenship. That’s a narrow carve-out, but it’s legally defensible, and more importantly, it’s hard to argue against without sounding like you’re defending a loophole that was never meant to exist in the first place.
Second, and this is the one with teeth: the babies of mothers who lie about their intentions when applying for a tourist visa while pregnant. Trump explained the logic himself: “This was done right after the Civil War. This was for the babies of slaves, and what’s happening now? People are building businesses around it.”
People are building businesses around it. He’s right. The 14th Amendment was ratified to ensure that the children of freed slaves —people who had been legally denied personhood— could never again be stripped of citizenship. It was not written to create a luxury immigration product for wealthy foreign nationals who want to buy their newborn an American passport for the price of a business-class ticket and a hospital bill. Nobody thinks the Reconstruction Congress was thinking about five-star maternity hotels in Los Angeles when they drafted that language.
It’s another Catch-22. Under the new order, if you tell the truth on your visa application —“I’m coming to the United States to give birth so my child gets citizenship”— you don’t get the visa. If you lie, the executive order says your child doesn’t get citizenship anyway, because you obtained entry through fraud. There is no third option. The window that existed before is now either locked or booby-trapped.
The Times, predictably, was baffled by how any of this could “realistically be enforced.” They wondered How will we ever know if someone lied on a visa application?,apparently forgetting that the entire apparatus of the federal government exists, in large part, to find out if anyone lied on forms. That’s not a loophole in the system. That is the system.
🔥 This illustrates the bigger picture, the one to keep in mind every time the corporate media runs a “Trump loses in court” headline. The left has spent two years treating judicial rulings as the end of the story. Trump treats them as the beginning of the next chapter. SCOTUS closed the door on the broad approach? Fine. He’s finding the specific, narrow, legally defensible windows, like the fraud angle, the diplomatic status angle, the territorial angle that still needs congressional action but is already on the table.
Behold! This is how the Overton window moves. Slowly, gradually, not in one dramatic kick, but in a series of incremental, targeted, legally grounded steps that each, individually, seem modest, and each, individually, are doggedly hard to argue against in public without looking like you’re defending visa fraud and diplomatic loopholes.
By the time the opposition has finished litigating step one, steps two and three are already in motion.
The left is howling and the ACLU is already drafting lawsuits. But Trump just forced them to stand up in court and defend, with a straight face, the proposition that a woman who lied on her visa application to give birth in America should have her child’s citizenship protected by the 14th Amendment. Good luck defending that. Trump wins either way, whatever the courts do, legally or politically.
Think about it. If SCOTUS explicitly blesses birth tourism, there’s no way it could conclude that the drafters anticipated concierge birth clinics. It will be forced to admit it’s an unforeseen and unfortunate problem, a 14th Amendment loophole. Apparently you can buy a passport, but you can’t buy that kind of political mandate.
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The New York Times ran a remarkably candid piece yesterday headlined, “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left.” Corporate media is panicking, and I, for one, am here for it. (I will presume for the sake of argument that such a thing as a ‘moderate’ Democrat actually exists.)
For the last two years, the Democrat establishment thought the 2026 midterms would be fought on their preferred ground: healthcare, affordability, and reminding everyone how much they hate Orange People. But as the primaries wrap up, they’ve realized they aren’t fighting Republicans. They are fighting to keep their own coalition together. Classic polycrisis.
The story opened with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s U.S. Senate primary. El-Sayed, an all-in Muslim and progressive darling, easily knocked off the establishment’s hand-picked moderate, handing the centrists their most painful defeat of the year. He wasn’t the only one. As you know, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have been quietly racking up wins in Dem primaries, ousting incumbents from New York to Colorado, and even primarying another sitting congressman in Detroit this week. Plus the whole Zohran “Free Groceries” Mamdani thing, but I digress.
El-Sayed is the Democrats’ second DSA candidate for U.S. Senate in this midterm contest. Remember DSA-endorsed ‘lumberjack’ Troy Jackson, who stepped into the race over Graham Platner’s political corpse? The Democrats had hoped to sweep the Senate. Now, two of their four competitive races —half— sport red roses.
The establishment is officially terrified. Jonathan Cowan, president of the ‘centrist’ Democrat think tank Third Way openly declared war. “We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” he told the Times. He announced a $15 million effort to discredit democratic socialism between now and 2028.
In other words, the Democrat establishment is about to spend $15 million attacking their own voters’ democratically preferred candidates. Glorious.
(University of British Columbia Professor of ‘Justice’ Naomi Klein switched off the comments on her own post. Perfect.)
🔥 Here is the buried lede, a brutal irony that nobody in the corporate media is pointing out: the Democrats did this to themselves. They raised the wolves inside their own house.
For the last two years, the Democrat establishment leaned hard into affordabilityand economic anxiety as their primary weapon against Trump. They told their voters every single day that the system was rigged, corporations were gouging everyone, and capitalism was failing the young.
It was just meant to be another cynical Democrat turnout tactic. But it turned into a gateway drug.
When a party’s core message is that the capitalist system is fundamentally broken, corrupt, and controlled by Nazi oligarchs, that party has just made the strongest possible recruiting pitch for the DSA. Democrats validated the entire socialist worldview. The only difference between a “moderate” Third Way Democrat and a DSA socialist at that point seemed to be that the socialist was willing to say the quiet part loud and actually do something about it, rather than form a bipartisan task force.
And the DSA capitalized on it perfectly. According to City & State New York, the DSA’s national membership nearly doubled between October 2024 and December 2025, surging from 50,000 to over 90,000— the exact same period during which the Democrats were platforming their cool new ‘affordability crisis’ narrative. Here’s the headline, from January:
The generational data is even worse for the Democrat establishment. A recent Cato Institute poll found that a staggering 62% of Americans aged 18–29 now hold a “favorable view” of socialism (thanks, Democrats), while a Gallup poll noted that only 31% of Democrats under 50 have a positive view of capitalism.
The naíve Zoomers driving this socialist wave don’t remember Stalin, the Cold War, or even the USSR. It’s not a lived memory for them; it’s a boring history class they half-paid attention to while scrolling TikTok. To them, “socialism” doesn’t conjure images of bread lines in Moscow or the Stasi kicking down doors at 3 a.m. It conjures utopian Scandinavian healthcare, free college, cheap Manhattan rent, and Zohran Mamdani’s Instagram account.
For a generation of Zoomers, the word “socialist” has been completely whitewashed of its historical baggage. Democrats created their own political Frankenstein’s monster, which is wearing rose earrings and stomping down their little utopian villages in primaries.
🔥 In this metaphor, Democrats are Dr. Frankenstein and the monster looks a lot like Hasan Piker —or “HasanAbi,” as his 3.1 million Zoomer Twitch followers know him— who has become perhaps the most perfect symbol of exactly what the Democrat establishment has created and is rampaging out of control.
Piker is a self-described ‘socialist streamer,’ nephew of Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, and a man who proclaims that America “deserved 9/11” and that he didn’t “have an issue” with Islamist terror group Hezbollah. He is also, at this precise moment in history, one of the most influential political kingmakers on the American left.
The Times’ story on the socialist surge (and the establishment’s panic spiral) noted that, after nine of Hasan’s endorsed candidates won their New York primaries in June, Hasan aimed his streaming camera directly at Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY), a pro-Israel Democrat, and delivered what can best be described as a mob-movie warning: “Ritchie Torres, I know you won tonight. I’ll see you in two years, motherf—r. I’m coming for you, Ritchie. Sit on that f—ng seat for the next two years.”
Rep. Torres earned Piker’s ire by penning earnest letters to Twitch and Amazon executives calling Piker “dangerous” and accusing him of living in “a morally inverted universe.” Which was a bold move by a congressman sitting in a district politically dependent on the very voters Piker is organizing.
Meanwhile, El-Sayed —the man whose Michigan primary win triggered the establishment’s current meltdown— campaigned openly alongside Piker, betting that every older voter he loses over the association will be replaced by a younger voter who found out about him on a livestream. El-Sayed isn’t flirting with Piker. They are practically joined at the hip. The night before the Michigan primary —the vote that just propelled the centrist wing into a $15 million panic spiral— El-Sayed spent the evening at a pool party with Piker. Then, after he won, Piker showed up as El-Sayed’s keynote speaker at the victory party.
The Democrat establishment built the grievance. Piker and his Zoomer followers built the pipeline. El-Sayed is swimming laps through the hole.
The New Yorker euphemistically called it “a different theory of electability.” Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), watching it all unfold from Pennsylvania, called it something straight. On CNN after the results came in, Fetterman summarized the problem like this: “Continue to campaign with Hasan Piker right now. You’re in a general election now, I dare you. I dare you! Keep campaigning with someone like Hasan Piker. If I were a Republican, I would just dump $20 million for ads.”
John Fetterman! The guy who attends the Senate in shorts and a hoodie, the one who stroked out mid-campaign, is now the Democrats’ voice of reason. Somebody explain to me how we got here.
🔥 It’s not that Democrats despise communists. No. The real problem is that Democrats hate losing, which is now an imminent threat in the form of a massive reaction gap between their primary voters and their general-election voters. Primary voters, including lots of Zoomers hopped up on TikToks and MSNBC performative outrage, are euphorically pulling the lever for candidates who want to abolish the Senate, defund the police, empty the prisons, and ensure avocado toast for breakfast every day.
But there is a snag. Isn’t life always like that? The snag is that those DSA candidates must now face general-election voters, who generally favor things like police and prisons.
Enter the so-called “DSA Dodgers.” That’s a derogatory term the Times coined in a companion piece detailing the hilarious gymnastic contortions these candidates are going through to conceal their socialist affiliations and “pivot to the center,” now that the primaries are over.
Consider Francesca Hong, the front-runner in the Wisconsin governor’s race. Hong is a dues-paying member of the DSA. In the past, she has unapologetically called to abolish the police, empty the prisons, and abolish the U.S. Senate. But now that she’s facing a general election in a purple state, she’s suddenly suffering from ideological amnesia.
At a recent debate, and for the first time, Hong suddenly and miraculously discovered she did “not support the full platform of the national D.S.A.” and complained that it was “concerning to me when I’m pigeonholed as the D.S.A. candidate.”
But … she literally joined the pigeonhole club, paid the pigeonhole dues, and ran on the pigeonhole platform, but now she’s shocked —shocked!— that people are calling her a pigeon. It’s the Costanza doctrine of politics: it’s not a socialist platform if you pretend you never read it. It’s not a lie, Jerry, if you really believe it.
🔥 This kind of in-and-out-running is not without cost. The DSA’s true believers are furious at the dodgers. At their recent national summit in Chicago, DSA hardliners called dodgers “sell-outs” and demanded ideological purity. Cerena Ermitanio, a member of the “Bread and Roses” caucus (I did not make that name up), complained about candidates who “hide the rose” and demanded they “wear their rose proudly.”
In case that reference seems obscure, the red (of course) rose is the official symbol of the Democratic Socialists of America, and of ‘democratic socialism’ worldwide. It traces back to the European labor and socialist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where a rose representing the beauty of the socialist ideal was paired with a clenched fist representing labor solidarity. The DSA adopted the logo as its primary visual identity, and its candidates often wear a red rose pin on their lapel as a commie dog-whistle.
Another Bread and Roses member, Johanna Von Maack, wondered whether the Democrats would eventually “kick us out,” adding that the Democrats need the socialists more than the socialists need the Democrats.
It’s a giant, multi-edged boomerang. The Democrat establishment spent ten years cultivating the radical left, funding their non-profits, indulging their campus protests, and using their volunteer energy to win elections. Then they poured gas on the flames with their all-in affordability narrative. Now the radicals and mushy-skulled Zoomers have decided they don’t want to be junior partners anymore. They want the car keys.
The establishment thought they were buying guard dogs. The guard dogs turned out to be wolves, and now Democrats are spending (at least) $15 million trying to build a cage inside their own house.
Have a fantastic Friday! C&C will return tomorrow with the Weekend Edition roundup, and it promises to be another doozy. Don’t miss out on the latest essential news with caffeinated commentary. In this case, FOMO is your friend.
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