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Charles C. W. Cooke, John Yoo, and Richard Epstein debate whether Meta can really be held responsible for the harms of social media, whether Texas can put the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms, and whether the enormous defamation judgments against Donald Trump can survive Supreme Court scrutiny. They conduct an intense debate over Trump’s White House ballroom, including questions of standing, congressional authority, private funding, and just how far a president can go in remaking the executive mansion. Across all four disputes, the conversation keeps returning to the same fault lines: runaway damages, judicial power, constitutional limits, and whether courts are applying the law—or inventing it.
Discussion (5)
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I'd like to start my post on the discussion of whether Trump is tearing down part of the White House, which is how this discussion is framed by a picture Steve Sailer posted in an article he wrote, that Trump is NOT tearing down the White House:
So even though I should have known better, even though I have looked up the White House Complex on Wikipedia and seen how it's mapped out and that the East Wing was, and the West Wing still is, separate buildings, I always imagined that this was where the East Wing and West Wing are located.
Practically speaking, the East Wing is less historical than the West Wing where the Oval Office is located. The executive mansion part of the White House complex is roughly 225 years old. The West Wing is 114 years old and so is the East Wing. There is a concourse connecting the Executive Mansion and the West Wing. There was a corridor that connected the Executive Mansion and the East Wing.
All three structures are considered separate buildings. So when Charlie and Richard were arguing whether tearing down the East Wing was an improvement to a building under the law, if you consider the East Wing a separate building, then calling tearing it down completely and rebuilding it as an improvement to an existing building seems like a very weak argument.
Historically, and unlike the West Wing, the East Wing was never a place where historical decisions were made. And it was never considered desirable office space, so they handed it to the First Lady's staff.
So from my viewpoint, tearing down the East Wing wasn't a travesty. But I do think that Trump violated the law when he tore it down. But in the end, it is torn down. There is no remedy for that, but Congress should be the government body that determines what takes its place, or if it sits on its collective hands, let the eyesore continue.
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In regards to John's suggestion of visiting the locations of famous Supreme Court cases, I happened to visit one a couple of weeks ago. I'd visited the Gateway Arch twice in high school and either forgot or hadn't picked up that the courthouse nearby was the scene of the Dred Scott case. We drove to Ohio the first week of August to take our daughter to camp and stopped at the Arch on the way home. We didn't go in the courthouse though.
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As a Texas resident, I think the background of the Texas law directing the posting of the Ten Commandments is relevant, and shows the case much closer to the type of case Prof. Epstein says should win.
The law was developed in response to years of teachers and school administrators posting many types of anti-religious, anti-moral (or not-Judeo-Christian Western Civilization moral) messages in classrooms and common areas and refusing to allow pro-religious, pro-Judeo-Christian-Western-Civilization moral messages to be posted. So, the Texas legislature is trying to correct for an extensive history of anti-religion, anti-moral bias in many schools.
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Why do we need government schools? We don't. Collect the taxes and give the money to the parents.
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