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Which is why this method cannot work.
If indeed the Trump administration is "coming around" to the idea that things like having ideologues pro forma swear they aren't doing things according to their ideology rather than the formal rules will help, the administration is screwing up.
is undefined, so one cannot determine how generally scoped your claim is. My comment was very clearly making a scope argument (about your own argument), so this is just non-responsive.
Alternatively, the most natural of the charitable interpretations is that you agree with my scope claim and acknowledge that your own proposal suffers at least the same defects.
Slightly less charitably, you're just doubling down on misdirection and obfuscation. Bad faith argumentation stuff.
"This method" refers to:
My claim is that this will not work. University ideologues will just lie, and it will not be possible to punish them for it.
Oh hey, if only I had an entire comment responding to that, which you seem to not have engaged with.
Don't blame him. I already addressed the "sometimes the government is held by my opponents" problem, and when I said Republicans should do exactly what Democrats have done to harden their policy achievements, and listed specific means and methods they did of achieving this, you deployed tactical ignorance and said I hadn't laid out any plan at all, or even the concepts of a plan.
I spelled out how exactly you were missing anything approaching a plan, specifically for universities.
Indeed, you did not have that. You literally had:
That's it. That's all you had. We can just read your comment and see that that's all that you had. How is that supposed to work? Give me an example, an idea, a process, an anything. You claim my ignorance is "tactical". I claim my ignorance is just ignorance. I honestly have no idea how this is supposed to work. I mean, can I just sue you right now in a way that lets my neighbor sue you some more in case I die next year? Just all out of magic or something?
The specific behavior is called a cy pres settlement; where the recipient of a settlement is not available, or where their personal damages represent only a small portion of all people harmed, a judge may authorize a large 'donation' to a third party as part of a settlement.
The easiest case is where the federal government is acting as a 'friendly' defendant. Rojas v. FAA? The FAA can suddenly have a change of hard, and decide that in addition to giving a million bucks to the harmed parties and their lawyers, they can also want to give a hundred million dollars to a I Hate Affirmative Action group.
There's limits to this approach; while cy pres settlements are very hard to challenge, it can happen, and some settlements in general end up worth no more than the value of the toilet paper they were written on after an administration changes. A naive person would argue that recent court cases have shown the willingness of Biden-friendly judges to put the kibosh on those efforts; a remotely aware one would recognize that those principles don't cut both ways.
But it's still a powerful tool, and one that's very hard to undo. Meanwhile, thanks to the very slow pace of any attempt to bring a court case to full and final judgement and the increasing tolerance of standing gamesmanship, it's near impossible to actual complete a judgement by putting a law on the books, or force an unfriendly administration to do anything.
((Though not impossible. There's another very dangerous option, and that's intentionally arguing cases as poorly as possible or with such 'incompetence' as to be sure that the courts will not 'agree with your claimed position'. As I continue to be fond of pointing out, Guiliani could absolutely use a job where making false claims, butt-dialing privileged information, and making incoherent arguments is tolerated, and the feds love two out of the three.
You would think, given the impact of res judicata, that this would be extremely harmful, and you'd be right! Too bad fewer and fewer people care.))
Thanks for a cite to the type of settlement; that's valuable information.
I guess where I'm at is that all this is fine. You and @WhiningCoil have identified a way to get money, and it is hard to undo that getting of money. But I guess I view it as that the following is the plan:
There doesn't seem to be anything special about this form of getting money as opposed to any other form of getting money (except that it's bad and the left did it, so it's a chance to get in a partisan dig). I'm not sure why I couldn't just swap some other form of getting money into this plan and conclude that it will solve the problem in the same way. I guess it's because you're deciding that you're going to get that money from the universities when you sue them? Uhhh, so how does that help? Is that what was demonstrated to work in the past? Did prior Democratic administrations actually fix something about the banks or whoever they sued when they got money from them? If not, then ??? If so, then my sense is that it would probably have been something about the thing that they actually sued about and other terms of the settlement that involved them changing some behavior (rather than just giving money) that actually 'fixed' them. And those things are totally missing from this plan.
This (bad, partisan) way of getting money may be doable and hard to undo, but it seems to not even have a passing familiarity with solving any of the actual problems we set out to solve. We were talking about ways to fix universities, the concern came up that future administrations might undo something, then we sort of jumped randomly to "this is a thing that's hard to undo!". I mean, we could have jumped to me eating a hamburger. It's hard to undo me eating a hamburger. But's it's not terribly relevant to the conversation in any other way, either.
It is, potentially, a massive amount of money; it can, potentially, be specifically targeted and legally obligated to be used for a specific partisan activity; it also leaves a massive ideologically-unappealing penalty that will often be directly acting as a reminder while waving signs on the lawn of the bad actors in question.
The Democratic administrations did, in fact, get the banks (and many tech companies) willing to bend over backwards out of fear of costly not!fines which would sent to activist groups that hated them and would have the backing to bring other costly lawsuits. I wouldn't call it fixing, since I don't have the same goals as the but the banks drastically revamp their behaviors for more than a decade, even through the first Trump admin, both on who they allowed to have accounts and who they didn't.
There's reasons that might not work for the Republican Party -- judges tend to treat colleges better and Republicans worse, having an adequate supply of favorable news coverage seems like it was important, the Red Tribe does not have as many of the relevant dedicated administrative agents required, and there's just a second actor disadvantage. But it's not an Underpants Gnome proposal.
It doesn't reduce the ability of the federal government to act against universities, if that's what you're asking. But that ship has sailed; no one has any proposal with any chance of working to do that. If we want university administrations to be less likely to actively discriminate, and to not promote hilariously fraudulent partisan activities under the auspices and honors of 'research', I'd love an answer that wasn't the government's carrot or stick. But there's zero idea on how to do that.
Your own proposal of requiring administrators to affirm things isn't even coherent within that framework, but it's also a joke given that these orgs were long supposed to already be affirming it, and were more likely to get in trouble for fucking with an antivirus setting than for putting out Whites Need Not Apply signs.
I think it does. There are several extant lawsuits focusing on unlawful DoE discrimination against disfavoured minorities, university discrimination against disfavoured minorities, of widespread fraudy behaviors by colleges and their research components, and that's before the widespread tolerance or outright advocacy of political discrimination or violence. Many of these orgs running those lawsuits have a lot of focus on these problems; many of these lawsuits are focused on the very specific issues that impact the ability of academic institutions to perform in their claimed roles.
And those are just the lawsuits already in pipe. A lot of the other stuff doesn't have lawsuits floating around simply because any lawyer worth their salt knows without a friendly federal admin it'd be a vanity suit.
Again, I'm not convinced this will work! But again, it's also far from Underpants Gnomes.
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Fine, I'll show you where the bodies are buried.
The Obama administration was shaking down companies, and structuring the settlements to fund left wing NGOs So for example, Eric Holder as Attorney General sued Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and others, and funneled the settlements through a structure that allowed these companies to pay less if instead of paying the government, they paid leftwing NGOs like ACORN, National Council of La Raza, National Urban League, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, etc.
Picking on the National Urban League, they took this money (or some of this money, money is fungible) and used it to fight Trump in court repeatedly. Here they are in 2020 suing Trump, again in 2025. Oh, and here they were in 2020 suing the administration over how the census was being conducted, resulting in immigration status being excluded from the census. That was pretty significant. Really changes the electoral map.
So you see, by shaking down big banks during the Obama administration, through a structured settlement program, Democrats were able to use federal resources to launder their policy goals beyond the mere 8 years of their administration. I want Republicans to do exactly this. Only instead of big banks, I want them to sue Universities, force them to settle exactly the same way Eric Holder did with malicious prosecution, and then structure those settlements such that they are forced to fund right wing NGOs that will continue to fight for those policy goals after Trump is out of office. Just the same way the National Urban League did for Obama even after he was out of office.
And if you still think this is all too vague, too wishy washy, not even the concepts of a plan, with all these specific, cited, historical examples, I don't know what to tell you.
Thank you for providing something, though that link is a trainwreck in terms of having basically no real information to go off of. Thankfully, Cato and FedSoc have significantly better articles, with at least some traceable cites to see some real info. Still not super great. Near impossible to follow the cites to actual numbers, and when you do find actual numbers, they're pretty piddly.
Nevertheless, there shouldn't have been a single dollar done that way. Trump should have supported a statutory ban, and those settlements should have been thrown out on Constitutional grounds, as well. Frankly, if Trump started doing it, I would say that they should be thrown out on Constitutional grounds, too.
In my defense, your original comment went through quite the journey, talking about fabricating criminal conspiracies and just general government spending. I see that you're now focused solely on being upset about one specific thing that was done by Obama/Biden and want to use that specific thing.
Now, some thoughts. The context for all this was (your comment and mine):
This strategy doesn't do anything to reduce the ability to the use the federal government as a weapon against universities. It doesn't do anything to actually fix anything with universities, AFAICT. ISTM that the purpose of the goal is purely extractive, as you viewed prior acts as extractive. You certainly haven't given a way that it should be done that is oriented toward fixing anything instead of being primarily extractive. As I wrote, there's nothing specific about universities. No reason why they should be the target for extractive suits rather than anyone else (except, I guess, you don't like them). Not really any grounds on which to go after them that could produce settlements that could conceivably be funneled to Elon. But whatever. Finally, it does nothing to alleviate your concern that the government is sometimes held by your opponents. In fact, as I responded, I think some on the right are worried about the risk of never-ending reprisals and descent into further banana republic, rather than actually contributing to a solution. But fair enough on your preferences. Perhaps you have a concept of a plan, but it clashes with your originally-stated goals, and it still has significant work to get to something real.
One final note is that connection to being able to continue suing is weak. Yes, money is fungible, but it was particularly ill-motivated in the original comment. Like, the thing that Elon lacks for being able to sue a future government is money? Lol wut? It sure sounded like there was something legal going on, rather than just money. Honestly, left wing NGOs probably get significantly more money through regular appropriations (and bullshit appropriations when they were, indeed, shoveling money out the front door during COVID/IRA/whatever). It took me a bit to realize that you were mostly just pissed about one terrible thing they did, didn't really have any specifics of how it could work the other way, didn't really have any sense of how it could actually fix the problems identified, didn't really have the qualities that one would naturally expect from a reading of your comment, and also worked against your originally-stated goal. Yeah, I was kinda dumb for not figuring it out for a while.
Except it does. Look at my example. The Obama administration was able to launder federal resources into NGO's that could continue to pursue their policy goals long after a Democrat was out of the White House. That's how you do it. Instead of having the Trump administration sue Universities for being racist against white people, you fund right wing NGOs by any means nessecary, and then they can pursue your policy goals long after the government has changed hands back to the opposition. That way when Pete Buttigeig takes office in 2028, he can't just have the Attorney General drop all the cases the Trump administration had ongoing. It's no longer in his hands. It's being done by (for example) Turning Point USA with a 100B warchest funded by structured settlements Pam Bondi forced on universities.
I don't understand how you say this doesn't work. It obviously has worked in the recent past!
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