United States Law and Policy

The two interesting legal challenges to the Trump legal “settlement” slush fund

28th May 2026

How two cases show how a problem can be attacked in two different ways

This blog has previously covered the extraordinary legal suit brought by Donald Trump against his own government and then the extraordinary supposed “settlement” of that law suit.

That “settlement” purported to use a private agreement (not placed before a court) to establish a high-value fund to benefit political allies of the president – including the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol.

It looked as if the legal side of the case was over, and it was now a matter for politics.

But the legal side is not over.

There are (at least) two legal challenges to what has happened, from different perspectives. Both are legally interesting, as they attack the problem from different legal angles.

One challenge is from two police officers who were at the Capitol during the attempted insurrection.

You can read their challenge here.

The police Plaintiffs are applying for orders and other court relief to quash the establishment of the fund – primarily on the basis that the federal government does not have the legal authority to do what it is purporting to do.

List of the Orders and other relief applied for by the plaintiffs.

This appears to be essentially a public law action against the federal government. It is exactly the right sort of case to bring against public bodies exceeding their powers.

The other case is far more legally ambitious and imaginative, and it has been brought by a posse of retired federal judges, who are “Movants” (lovely legal word) of a motion for the court itself to re-open the case.

This is also exactly the right challenge to bring – but in respect of what appears to have been the abuse of process which led to the supposed “settlement”.

If the Movants succeed then the court will re-open the case and continue with its inquiry into whether there was a real dispute.

Some abuses of the law are straightforward, and when they occur they usually lend themselves to an obvious remedy.

But the more extraordinary the abuse, the more any remedy has to be especially fashioned.

Here the police Plaintiffs and the federal judge Movants have worked out two different ways to approach the instant situation – one by attacking the outputs (the setting up of the fund), the other attacking the inputs (the way the supposed litigation ended).

I am not an American lawyer, and so I do not know if either case has merit and/or will have traction. But both are interesting ways to get the courts to weigh back in an utter outrage that had looked as if it had escaped the courts.

The odd setting up of what appears to be a corrupt slush fund for the allies of President Trump

22nd May 2026

In which a settlement agreement is pushed far beyond any proper legal limits

Contract law is a fascinating subject: it is about how parties can create legal obligations and rights between themselves which otherwise would not exist.

Constitutional and other forms of public law are, of course also fascinating: for they set out what can and cannot be done by those charged with public power.

And when contract law and constitutional law mix, then the results are even more fascinating.

The legal suit brought by President Trump (and his son and his corporation) against his own government is extraordinary for many reasons.

In particular two things stand out.

First, there does not seem to be a dispute capable of being adjudicated by a court.

Second, there does not seem to have been a settlement in any legally recognisable form.

To adapt a famous techie saying: bizarre in, bizarre out.

In reality the whole exercise is brazen corruption. Everyone knows this, though many do not seem to care. It is the sort of thing that should (but will not) lead to Trump’s immediate impeachment and removal from office.

But, this being a law and policy blog, let us go though the motions of looking at this racket from a legal perspective. If anything, it will show what an odd thing is going on.

As this blog has already set out (as well as at this Prospect piece), the law suit was a rum affair.

That is not to say there was not an underlying legal wrong: the leaking of the president’s tax returns (even if in the public interest) was an unlawful act and indeed the leaker has been prosecuted under the criminal law.

And generally (if not universally) speaking where there is a criminal offence there is usually a civil wrong – what lawyers call a tort.

The records of Trump were leaked by a government contractor and so, in principle, there is both blame and a claim.

But on this basis, Trump and his co-plaintiffs constructed a demand for an extortionate amount – far above what would be the level of damages for such a wrong – and brought the claim at a time when Trump was in effect the head of the defendants. Trump thereby would have effective control of both sides of the case.

The plaintiffs, however, encountered a problem. The court was not convinced it could hear a claim where one person controlled both sides. And if there is not an actual dispute between parties in disagreement, then the court would not have jurisdiction to hear the claim.

At this point the judge could have simply stuck out the suit for want of jurisdiction (though that probably would have been appealed). Instead, the judge invited the parties to make submissions on the jurisdiction point – and she also appointed independent lawyers as “friends of the court” to make submissions which the parties may selfishly not wish to make.

The deadline for those submissions was last week. But the plaintiffs did not make submissions. They pulled the case instead. The claim was dropped.

Court order with highlighted text ORDER CLOSING CASE THIS MATTER is before the Court on Plaintiffs’ Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with Prejudice (“Notice”) (DE 52). In the Notice, Plaintiffs state that they are voluntarily dismissing the instant litigation with prejudice

We will never now get to know how the court would determine the issue.

And if you looked at the court record – the online docket is publicly available here – that is the end of the story.

But the story does not end there.

There is a supposed “settlement” – click here.

This is not a settlement agreement which the parties put before the court to be endorsed. It is thereby not an agreement that has been recognised by the court, still less are its terms enforceable by the court before which the relevant litigation was brought.

It is instead a private agreement between parties to, among other things, bring the litigation to an end.

Such private side agreements are possible, though the parties lose any benefit of the relevant court recognising and enforcing the terms of the agreement.

The remarkable thing about the supposed settlement agreement is not that it ends the law suit – it is what the agreement purports to do as well.

In essence: a private settlement agreement is being used as a basis for legislating for a lucrative fund for the benefit of third parties and immunity from criminal prosecution for the plaintiffs.

Contracts – including settlement agreements – can be used for many complex and imaginative things, but this goes beyond the extremes for what any contract can properly be used for.

This is instead the sort of stuff that legislation is for, passed by Congress – not a settlement agreement which has not even been placed before a court for endorsement.

The settlement agreement even purports to provide for the tax status of this fund, a fund which is intended to benefit those allies of the president who have been accused of and convicted of crimes against public officials.

We are in strange times and so nobody can say with any certainty that this slush fund will be held to be unlawful if not unconstitutional.

The scheme should, of course, be quashed on the spot.

The cynical audacity of the proposal, and the means by which it has been contrived, warrant gasps – though not of admiration.

Over at Prospect – click here – this week’s Weekly Constitutional post is about this example of sheer charlatanism.

And that post concludes by saying that if this sort of thing can be imagined by Trump and his cronies, whatever will he and his cronies try to get away with next.

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The purpose of processes and policies and law in government is not to make things better, but to stop things being even worse

5th May 2026

The real reason we need rules and procedures in public administration

It is a paradox that in the weeks and days before an election people tend to become less interested in law and policy. The focus instead turns to politics and personalities, and the soap opera of who is up and who is down, and who is in and who is out.

And in the days after the elections, those who could not predict the outcome will confidently assert that the result proved them right all along.

This is not really a politics blog, and it has no party-partisan preference. Indeed, the general view of the blog is that governments tend to be illiberal, regardless of which politicians take power, and that the politicians who affect to be liberal in opposition tend not to carry that liberalism over into office.

As the eminent jurists the Bonzo Dog Band aver, it can seem that no matter who you vote for the government always gets in.

But.

We have in popular opposition not only those parading their liberalism, but the illiberalism, and so voters have a choice between the possibility of liberalism (and likely disappointment) and the certainty of illiberalism (and likely despotism).

And so it is at times like that we should take more interest in the actual workings of government and now public administration works. We should watch how public administration is conducted with anxious scrutiny.

This is why, perhaps counter-intuitively, the whole Starmer-Mandelson-Robbins affair is important.

In respect of political drama, the matter may not be of lasting import: the media caravan has moved on, and the attention-spans of the easily bored have been exhausted. The Prime Minister is still in office and if he is to be deposed, then it will because of a further political drama and not the one which has just passed.

The importance of what happened is otherwise than of immediate political effect. It was instead in the rare insight we had into how ministers and officials actually do make decisions (or don’t make decisions). The sort of thing which is usually hidden from public view.

An excellent balanced and informed account of the matter has now been posted at the Substack of the estimable former civil servant Martin Stanley. That post is required reading for anybody with an interest in our government in action (or inaction).

What I can add from the perspective of a former central government lawyer is that the informal-formal inexact process and lack of process is not unusual in Whitehall. The only difference here is that a stone has been lifted and we get to see what was teeming underneath.

(Public administration is more about teems than teams.)

Sometimes one can fall into the error of thinking government and administration is about the neat, almost-Euclidean geometry of decision trees and straight lines on a grand plane of an organogram. No, it is often a mess, both at the time and when there has to be an account of it afterwards.

This is why one the purpose of processes and policies and public law is not so much to make things go well, but to help stop things being worse. For example, the law of public procurement is not really there to help public authorities to make good purchasing decisions, but to stop public authorities making worse purchasing decisions than they otherwise would do.

And this is the significance of the Starmer-Mandelson-Robbins affair: we got to see under the rock. From that we can take the wider understanding that this is how important decisions and indecisions are made more generally. And that, in turn, helps explain why we have such an accountability gap in the government of the United Kingdom.

There is a general disconnect between how ministers and officials take decisions and how those decisions are accounted for to parliament, and to the media and public.

Certain executive-minded pundits and activists want to reduce even further the role of processes and policies and public law in government – to get rid of impediments and barriers.

They think that will make public administration better and more effective, but it is more likely to make public administration even worse than it already is.

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Trump is suing his own government for $10 billion

May Day, 2026

And he wants to negotiate with his own government for a settlement sum

One thing about fundamental legal principles is that they are rarely expressly feature in litigation – at least not expressly. That is because they are fundamental – they are shared and assumed to apply.

Such principle provide the “rules of the game” and the courts deal with disputes about things the parties do not share in common, like differing views on the facts and on the applicable law in a particular situation.

This is why – at least until fairly recently – constitutional law text books both here and in the United States often did not have many recent cases as precedents or even illustrations of certain fundamental principles. An 1800s case there, a 1700s case here, some vague mention of Magna Carta, and that would be it – for paragraph after paragraph, and chapter after chapter.

But the Brexit-Trump years have changed this. Such is the jolt to the United Kingdom and United States polities that certain hitherto constitutional and legal norms in the background have to the fore. Points which one never expected to be the subject of a practical case now fall for judicial determination.

And in the United States we have a case which goes to the very heart of any litigation system, with the court having to ask “what actually is a dispute?”.

That case, of course, is the one where Donald Trump is suing the United States Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service.

I have written about this case this week over at Prospect – click here.

Although nominally Trump is doing this (with his son and company) in a personal capacity, and not formally as president, the reality is that the president is suing his own administration – for $10 billion.

And so in reality he wants to negotiate, with himself, and to agree, with himself, for a resolution where the suit is compromised for a high amount of money, in the region one suspects of $10 billion.

It is an extraordinary case, even at a time of many extraordinary cases.

In one way, Trump has a point: he was legally wronged by the Treasury and IRS. His tax returns were unlawfully leaked. And this is the case even if he, like other presidents, should have voluntarily disclosed his tax returns to the public. There has been a prosecution and a conviction of the leaker.

A follow-on civil case is not thereby surprising, for generally (but not universally) when there is a crime there is also a tort.

(That said, there was once an over-confident law lecturer who insisted that there was a tort for every crime and challenged the class to gainsay him, to which one annoying student offered ‘blasphemy’. Sorry.)

So if Trump has been civilly wronged, he should in principle be able to bring a case for damages.

But what makes this case problematic is that he currently controls both sides of the litigation.

This is because of his position as head of government, and also because of an executive order which prevents any federal body or employee from putting forward a view of law distinct from the president.

All this means that not only is he effectively litigating with himself, he would also be effectively negotiating with himself for settling that litigation.

(A great deal of civil litigation ends in settlement.)

There is a legal principle so fundamental that it is sometimes described as one of the very rules of natural justice.

This principle is that a person should not be a judge in their own cause.

Here the application of the principle would be that a person should not settle a legal dispute with themselves. Indeed, one can fairly ask if there is a dispute at all in such circumstances.

And that is what the federal judge has asked in this case.

In this fascinating four-page order judge Kathleen Williams goes back to the very first principles of law to ask whether there is actually a dispute here to be determined.

She did not dismiss the case, but she is now seeking legal argument on the point.

Given there has been a civil wrong to Trump, there is the question of how his private law rights could be enforced against the government while he is a sitting president.

Perhaps the case should be stayed for the duration of his presidency, without prejudice to any limitation period. Or perhaps independent attorneys should be selected to litigate the case on the parties’ behalf, with Trump blind to their litigation decisions, or there could be some binding independent third-party adjudication.

There are various ways his legal position could be reserved or protected so that he is not simply negotiating a settlement with himself.

When litigation lawyers are trained they are warned about sham litigation cases where for money laundering or other purposes an artificial dispute is contrived and then “settled” for a huge a mount of cash changing hands.

What is happening in the United States is not a sham case: Trump has a claim.

But there are ways and means of bringing a claim, some less artificial than others, and the federal court in the United States now has to work out a way for Trump’s claim to be addressed while avoiding the spectacle of the president negotiating with his own federal employees for a cash payment of up to $10 billion.

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Why Melania Trump’s statement is a fascinating exercise in text and performance

10 April 2026

Hello and welcome to The Empty City blog, the new name of which is explained here.

A close reading of an odd public statement

Yesterday Melania Trump made an unexpected public statement.

The statement in its circumstances was odd. There was no formal requirement for her to make the statement, and there also seemed no particular reason for her to make the statement. The statement was not, for example, a response to any known media or legal development.

For viewers – and for many in Washington, it seems – the statement was out of the blue.

It was, in a word, odd.

This blog has no particular focus on Epstein and so on. There are many other online resources for anyone taking a close interest in the release (and non-release) of the Epstein files. This blog also is not concerned with the various documents and supposed documents and other material that may or may not connect Melania Trump with Jeffrey Epstein.

But this blog does like a good close reading.

And so what can we say (and not say) about this particular text in performance?

Let us explore.

We shall start with the text.

It was a prepared text.

It was also as text which, at least in part, was very carefully drafted to deal with certain potential issues of legal liability and to explain (and explain away) certain pieces of evidence. The text indicates that it was put together, at least in part, by someone skilled and experienced in drafting.

One should not under-estimate Melania Trump (or indeed anyone in public life) and, but for her performance of the text, one could readily assume that she may have drafted the text herself.

As the text engages with issues of potential legal liability not expressly stated in the text, one can perhaps discount that it was written by ChatGPT or some other generative AI. Some generative AI can be very plausible indeed – including for formal and legal texts – but usually not about things which are not also stated in the text.

The impression conveyed by the text is that it was authored by someone skilled in drafting sensitive statements.

So if it was a prepared text then when was it prepared and for what purpose.

The immediate assumption of many (including in the media) is that the statement was prepared for the purpose of this performance.

That may well be the case.

But it may also be the case that the statement (or an earlier version of it) was prepared earlier for another purpose and perhaps for publication or for reading to an inquiry, rather than to be read to camera.

It reads as a statement to be circulated. It was not a statement well suited to be read out to camera.

Melania Trump, as anyone who saw the footage saw, seemed unfamiliar with the text.

She stumbles over certain words, some of which were significant and, if anything, required emphasis.

This stumbling indicates (but does not prove) that she was not the author of the text.

(That English is not her first language is not a relevant point here: there are many for whom English is not a first language who would not stumble in these circumstances.)

Of course, the stumbling may just be nerves – and who would not be nervous in such circumstances – but it is more likely to indicate a lack of familiarity with she was reading.

The stumbling also indicates (but does not prove) that the performance was not prepared for or rehearsed.

If so, such a lack of preparation or rehearsal contrasts with the careful composition of the text.

If a carefully drafted text is intended for performance then one can presume that similar effort is put into the performance as the text. (Unless the performer is (over-)confident in not need preparation or rehearsal.)

This therefore indicates (but does not prove) that the text was not intended for this particular performance.

The impression is that the performance to camera was a late decision and a pre-existing text was used for the performance.

But, if it is correct that the text was drafted by a legal or other adviser then we come to a tension, if not a contradiction.

For it is hard to see what competent and prudent legal or other adviser would have advised her to volunteer this statement, out of the blue.

A competent and prudent legal or other adviser would presumably say that unless there is a formal requirement or other pressing reason to make such a statement, then it would be wiser not to make a statement.

And so we have what looks like a statement put together (at least in part) by an adviser performed in circumstances which no sensible adviser would advise that it be performed.

Odd.

Perhaps the statement is to to (p)rebut an impending legal or media development and if so, all will become clear.

But on the basis of this text in its performance, it was a curious thing.

Overall, the impression conveyed is that this is an exercise in crisis management (hence the well-prepared text) broken-off mid-flow in an unexpected way.

This post is also cross posted at The Empty City substack, which is run in parallel with this blog.

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The silences after a threat of genocide

9 April 2026

The impotence of both constitutional law and international law

What happens when the leader of the most powerful military nation in the world threatens to commit genocide?

Like this:

Well, it seems, from the perspectives of constitutional law and international law, that nothing happens.

Things could happen, of course.

There are two constitutional mechanism within the United States constitution for removing Donald Trump from office. Neither has been used or seem likely to be used.

There are sorts of sanctions that the international community could place on Trump. None have been used or seem likely to be used.

And so, as I set out in Prospect today (click kere):

we have a situation where perhaps the most serious threat imaginable is made and there is nothing which will be done or can be done.

One can legitimately ask what the purpose is of either constitutional law or international law if not to deal with situations like this.

Law is intended to deal with big things as well as little things.

Some things are significant when they happen.

And some things are significant when they do not happen.

And what is perhaps far more significant than the unpleasant and extreme post of Trump is that nothing happened, at least in respect of constitutional law or international law.

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The Mueller report was a turning-point where United States history failed to turn

24th March 2026

Hello and welcome to The Empty City blog, the new name of which is explained here.

The cynical reframing of the report by Trump’s administration worked in our low attention span age

The historian AJP Taylor once described the 1848 revolutions as a turning-point where German history failed to turn.

In the recent political and constitutional history of the United States there have been a few of these non-turning-points.

Most glaringly, one can point to those two failures by the Senate to convict the twice-impeached President Donald Trump.

But the death a few days ago of Robert Mueller reminds us of a particular media-political-constitutional non-turning-point: what happened and did not happen in 2019, when his report into on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was published.

The content of the report was damning of in its details. On this see the useful and important post by former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance published today.

But as with all formal texts, we need to understand both the purpose of the text and its context.

It was a report, and nothing other than a report.

It was not an indictment, and still less a judicial determination.

And the report did the job of a report, leaving it to decision-makers to make decisions based on the report.

The evidence and findings in the report would speak for themselves.

But.

The evidence and findings in the report did not get to speak for themselves: they were drowned out.

The report was stymied on release by an effective and cynical countering operation involving the then attorney general William Barr and others.

The report had little chance in our low-attention-span age.

The report had 448 pages and no sound-bite summary.

In contrast, the Barr letter sent to Congress (mis)characterising the report and (mis)describing the content of the report was a mere 4 pages and was packed with quotable lines.

It was a sign of our times that the Barr letter got traction in politics and in the mainstream media and on social media and the throrough investigation set out in the report did not.

Trump even asserted that the report had cleared him.

But Trump’s response to Mueller’s death suggests that he never really believed that to be true.

Trump social media post saying “Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

“Robert Mueller just died. Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

If Trump genuinely believed he had been cleared by Mueller he really could not have posted that graceless response.

But he doesn’t, so he did.

In a way, the intensity of Trump’s response is a testament to Mueller’s diligent work on the report.

As is said on Christopher Wren’s tomb: si monumentum requiris, circumspice (if you seek a monument, look around).

If you want a monument to Mueller’s report look at Trump’s unpleasant response.

But what you don’t have as a monument was any adverse consequences for Trump.

Trump carried on as if the report never was published.

Trump was never held accountable for what was detailed in the report.

The Mueller report and the response to it was a turning-point where American history failed to turn.

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Why the United States attack on the school in Minab matters

23rd March 2026

The facts of the incident point to a breach of international law

Hello and welcome to The Empty City blog, the new name of which is explained here.

Let us assume the following facts:

1. that there was a guided missile;

2. that this guided missile had a pre-selected target; and

3. that this guided missile struck that pre-selected target as it was intended to do so.

If the missile was not a guided missile, or that it struck a target that was not the pre-selected target, then one or more of the facts posited above would not be true. But let us assume those facts are the case.

Let now assume the following additional facts:

4. that a school was the pre-selected target;

5. that the guided missile struck that pre-selected target as it was intended to do so; and

6. that over one hundred schoolchildren were killed in that strike.

If these facts are also true then there is a question about fact (4): was the school a deliberate target? Was the building selected for the strike by someone (or something) knowing it was a school?

If so, then there would be a war crime, as schools are protected from such attacks under international law – on this see the able article by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown here.

But what if the school was selected by someone (or something) without realising it was a school?

Then the question becomes whether that someone (or something) should have known it was a school.

And if they did not do everything feasible to verify the status of a targeted object then the targeter is also culpable and in breach of international law.

Over at Prospect – click here – I have done a post on whether the attack by the United States on a school in Minab is a breach of international law.

It would appear that from 2016 onwards, public domain and open source information would have shown that the school was no longer part of an adjacent compound of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

screengrab of new report on opensource material

This means that anybody (or anything) that bothered to check what they were actually doing with this $3.5 million piece of hardware, of which the United States only has a limited number, would have realised that the school was not a military target.

On costs grounds alone one would have thought they would check whether a missile would be ‘wasted’ – let alone humanitarian grounds.

But, as this New York Times report reveals, it seems that the United States did not bother to check up-to-date information. Instead the United States relied on out-of-date information, and so over one hundred schoolchildren were killed.

And Reuters now reports that United States military now realise they have a problem over this strike and have elevated the status of their internal inquiry.

At least the incident is being investigated.

Of course, few will feel confident that such an inquiry will lead to any open admission of culpability or any sanction against any individual.

You will probably have the Jean Charles de Menezes sort-of-situation where there was an overall, system failure – a lethal failure – but no particular person will take any blame.

But as the Prospect article concludes: in the current context of Artificial Intelligence, it would seem the application of human intelligence to public domain, open source information would mean over one hundred schoolchildren would probably still be alive today.

This post is also cross posted at The Empty City substack, which is run in parallel with this blog.

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What is not happening with constitutionalism in the United States and the United Kingdom

11th March 2026

Hello and welcome to The Empty City blog on law, policy, and lore – the new name of which is explained here.

A look at constitutionalism (and the lack of it) in the United States and United Kingdom, with reference to a 1980s computer magazine column

The first journalist who I knew by name was Lloyd Mangram, the writer of a monthly round-up of news for that wonderful 1980s magazine for Sinclair Spectrum users, Crash.

(Yes, I was a Speccie – less earnest than the BBC micro users, less bombastic than the Commodore 64 users, and less exotic than a Dragon 32 user.)

The Merely Mangram column was cheerfully discursive and leisurely, and it gave a better sense of what was going on (and not going on) generally in that world – especially for this then-teenage reader – than the news reports, interviews and reviews elsewhere in the computer press.

So you can imagine the devastation when I discovered one day that Lloyd Mangram did not actually exist – that this supposed author was actually a composite persona put together by the other magazine writers.

Lloyd Mangram was a fiction!

This was when I first learned to be cynical about the media.

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Nonetheless, there is merit in that sort of discursive commentary – especially about human affairs.

News reports are necessarily narrow; op-eds often promote a preconceived “angle” with motivated reasoning; explainers invariably work backwards from what topical particular point needs to be quickly explained.

But if [A] has some connection to [B], and in the meantime [C] is not happening, then a discursive approach can sometimes give more insight in what is going on, than any news report, an op-ed, or explainer.

And as Kenneth Tynan (who I think definitely existed?) says somewhere, the job of a critic is not only to say what is happening, but also to say what is not happening. This must also be true of a commentator.

Yet commenting on something which is not happening is not really what our media is geared to do, if you think about it. There is enough going on report and analyse, without setting out what is not happening.

In respect of the United States, what is not happening explains a great deal of what is happening.

What is not happening is any overall sense of constitutionalism.

President Trump and his circle are doing the worst of things, at home and abroad. There is a general approach of cruelty and violence, from Minnesota to the Indian Ocean .

But.

There are always Trumps. There are always Vances and Millers and Hegseths and Noems.

There are always knaves and fools, and there always those those who will serve knaves and fools.

The question is how constitutional arrangements – the division of powers, the checks and balances, the rule of law and the guarantees of certain fundamental rights – have failed and are failing to prevent what is happening.

The arrangements are there: Trump and his circle could face removal by impeachment at a stroke, and their antics could be consistently held to be unlawful.

Yet that is not happening.

What is not happening is any constitutionalist approach to restrain Trump and his circle.

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Here in the United Kingdom we have a different sort of thing which is not happening in respect of constitutional matters.

We have a supposedly left-of-centre government with a former human rights lawyer as Prime Minister – and with similar lawyers and ex-lawyers in prominent positions.

But we do not have any consistent overall view to constitutionalism and constitutional reform.

Yesterday – hurrah! – there was a vote passing the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords, some 115 years after such peers were allowed to remain in the legislature with what was intended to be a temporary stay.

This reform is the minimum required – and a great deal of Lords reform is undone, as is any (and arguably more important) Commons reform.

And also yesterday – boo! – there was a vote restricting trials by jury.

This change, of course, will make little or no difference to court backlogs, which to deal with requires resources at scale.

And as this blog has said many times, juries are less important for the powers that they have, than for the powers that they prevent others from having.

Again, this change is not part of any overall constitutional vision.

Many of the problems in the United States and United Kingdom come about from what is not not being done.

And in our focus of twenty-four news and doomscrolling, we are perhaps less able to notice what is not happening.

As one Speccie computer game character would have said:

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

(Source)

This post is also cross posted at The Empty City substack, which is run in parallel with this blog.

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Will the Carnival ever end?

Shrove Tuesday, 2026

The Contest between Carnival and Lent

by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (source)

Today is Shrove Tuesday, a moveable date which is reckoned as forty days before Palm Sunday.

Not long ago it was Candlemas, a fixed date – 2nd February – which is reckoned as forty days after Christmas.

(Candlemas, of course, has a special place on this blog.)

The gap between these dates is really a bridge between midwinter and the coming of spring.

It appears that the earliest possible date for Shrove Tuesday is 3rd February. The last time it was that early was in 1818. It seems the next time will be in 2285.

And so the two forty day periods reckoned respectively by Christmas and Easter can never actually overlap.

This blog has previously noted that the political culture of the United States – and to an extent in other places including the United Kingdom – is akin to the Carnival before Lent:

There are signs of push-back in the United States: with grand juries and state governments, and even in Congress and federal courts.

But the agents of misrule still are generally in power.

Many watching are waiting for the mid-term elections this November to see whether the current chaos can be paused; some are even actively seeking to avoid such an outcome.

But even if the mid-terms bring some relief from the carnival of cruelty in the United States, it will take far more than forty days to reverse the mess that has been created.

This is not a religious blog (I happen to be a non-militant atheist) but it is one concerned with lore as well as law, and a great deal of lore is to do with the passage of time and/or with the competing states of order and disorder.

Once the mid-terms come and go – whatever their outcome – what is happening now will be seen as having the inevitable consequence of what happens then.

Hindsight is perhaps the greatest and trickiest of hobgoblins.

As it stands, however, the outcome of what is now happening is uncertain.

We do not know who will win this contest between Carnival and Lent; we do not even know if it currently amounts to much of a contest.

But disorder, like order, is never bound to last forever.

Carnivals can and do eventually come to an end, even if not promptly forty days before an arbitrary date.

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This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.

Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated and comments will not be published if irksome, or if they risk derailing the discussion.

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