DEMOCRACY WATCHWho Will Stop the Drive for Unchecked Power? | Americans Don’t Do This | Mass Exodus at DOJ’s Civil Rights Office, and more

The Good Tsar  (Kevin D. Williamson, The Dispatch)
Trump’s sycophants are chosen because of their weaknesses, not in spite of them.

Who Will Stop Donald Trump’s Drive for Unchecked Power?  (Economist)
Congress is inert, but a deft Supreme Court might contain him.

Trump Recasts Mission of Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Office, Prompting ‘Exodus’  (Devlin Barrett, New York Times)
Hundreds of lawyers and other staff members are fleeing the arm of the agency that defends constitutional rights, which appointees intend to reshape to enact President Trump’s agenda.

A Road Map of Trump’s Lawless Presidency, According to 35 Legal Scholars  (New York Times Opinion)
In his first hours back as president, Donald J. Trump did an extraordinary thing: He made a direct assault on the Constitution. He declared that his government would no longer treat U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants or children of lawful, temporary immigrants as citizens, as the 14th Amendment commands.
You can draw a straight line from that executive order on birthright citizenship to his administration’s revocation of visas, the detention of foreign students and the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, to a Salvadoran prison and the subsequent refusal to try to extricate him in spite of court orders. Mr. Trump is claiming far-reaching but dubious powers, pushing or exceeding legal limits without first bothering to determine if they were permissible, as past presidents generally did.
Times Opinion recently reached out to dozens of legal scholars and asked them to identify the most significant unconstitutional or unlawful actions by Mr. Trump and his administration in the first 100 days of his second presidency and to assess the damage. We also asked them to separate actions that might draw legal challenges but are, in fact, within the powers of the president. And we asked them to connect the dots on where they thought Mr. Trump was heading.

On DOGE, Directives, and DOJ  (Anna Bower, Lawfare)
A new court filing reveals the most compelling evidence yet that the government has been spinning a fiction about DOGE in federal court.

Americans Don’t Do This  (Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic)
On Mahmoud Khalil and the right to free expression