☕️ FOR CAUSE ☙ Tuesday, December 9, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

SCOTUS takes a sleeper case that could rewrite government and dent the New Deal; expert-worship cracks; FDA panic over fearless covid warrior; storm of Dem scandals burst as midterms loom; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Yesterday was planes, trains, and automobiles, but I am now back, tenderly ensconced in Coffee & Covid’s Florida headquarters. We’ve not unpacked, but we’re back. This morning’s roundup of essential news includes: Supreme Court oral arguments in seemingly wonky side case signal potentially massive shifts in how our government works, and maybe even a rollback of the entire New Deal model; don’t get me started again about experts or why liberals love them; FDA freakout over temporary appointment of courageous and well-credentialed covid warrioress; storm of Democrat-connected scandals break open right as we turn the calendar corner into midterm territory.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

⚖️ ⚖️ ⚖️

Yesterday, social and corporate media were all atwitter discussing the latest Supreme Court arguments in a case named, appropriately enough, Trump v. Slaughter. The New York Times ran its story below the headline, “Justices Seem Ready to Give Trump More Power to Fire Independent Government Officials.” The sub-headline added, “A ruling in the president’s favor … would be a major expansion of presidential authority.”

To courtwatchers, it appears that SCOTUS is stretching and doing its warmup exercises and otherwise getting ready to clobber one of the legs of the Swamp’s stool. But it’s not obvious to regular folks why firing a lackwitted FTC commissioner that nobody ever heard of is a big deal. So let’s unpack.

In 2018, during Trump 1.0, the President appointed Democrat Rebecca Slaughter, pictured above, to the Federal Trade Commission’s five-member board. (By law, no more than three Commissioners can be from the same political party, which explains why he had to pick a Dem.) This year, 2025, when Trump got back, Ms. Slaughter received a tart email saying her services were no longer required.

Slaughter’s electronic pink slip gave no explanation, other than that her continued employment “was inconsistent with the President’s priorities.” This ran afoul of the FTC’s so-called “independence,” under which the President may only remove an FTC Commissioner for cause— and not just for policy disagreements.

Trump’s lawyers knew that, but they fired Slaughter without cause anyway, and then said it was about policy, practically daring her to sue them.

She took the bait and sued. The DC Circuit ordered Trump to reinstate Slaughter, unslaughtering her, so to speak, but SCOTUS overruled it, letting her termination stand. The case continued. Oral arguments occurred yesterday, with Washington’s elites on pins and needles waiting to see how the Supremes would come down.

The Times said Ms. Slaughter attended the oral arguments and “listened intently.” She really liked that job.

⚖️ Current law shields the heads of certain key regulatory agencies from removal by the President, even though the President appoints them to those posts and their agencies operate within the Executive Branch. An ancient (1935) FDR-era case with the colorful name Humphrey’s Executor, the Supreme Court found the job shield was constitutional, and that’s been the state of affairs ever since.

In short, agency heads like the FTC’s commissioners have no boss. You could call them “little kings” if you want. They rule tiny but important territories of regulatory resistance and are thorns in the sides of incoming administrations. Because commissioners and board members have staggered terms, and can’t be fired without cause, presidents are stuck with them until an opening appears, which could be years into a presidential term.

President Trump rejected that status quo. His lawyers think Humphrey’s Executor was a bad decision, like Roe v. Wade, and that it helped create the modern administrative bureaucracy, which we often call the (lower-case) deep state. And it appears the Court is ready to agree. The Times said, “the court’s conservative majority seemed ready to overturn or strictly limit the landmark 1935 decision.”

For instance, Chief Justice Roberts called Humphrey’s “just a dried husk of whatever people used to think it was.” As our friends from South of the Border would say, that probably means no mas.

⚖️ Nobody explained the problem posed by independent commissioners better than the Court’s most intellectually unique member, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Five, who set a new Guinness record by using the word “expert” (or a synonym) 37 times in a single sentence. (The previous record holder was Seamus McFardle of Finehausen, Scotland, who achieved a remarkable score of 34, but garnered an asterisk because he was intoxicated and stuttering badly.)

Specifically, in a near-Guinness level run-on sentence, Justice Jackson rhetorically moonwalked through the looney liberal notion that unelected technocrats are somehow smarter and more trustworthy than dumb politicians (or judges, for that matter) who are actually accountable to voters:

JACKSON: “Some issues, some matters, some areas, should be handled in this way by non-partisan experts, that Congress is saying that expertise matters with respect to aspects of the economy and transportation and the various independent agencies that we have, so having a president come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the Ph.D.s and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States, these issues should not be in presidential control.”

Anyone who’s read more than one C&C post knows how I feel about “experts.” Especially “experts” as Democrats loosely define that term, meaning people who believe men can get pregnant and who call castration “medical care.” (I volunteer to pay for their ‘medical care.’)

Ironically, the subject of this lawsuit, Ms. Slaughter, is neither a “scientist” nor a “doctor” nor a “PhD.” Nor is she “non-partisan.” She’s a politically connected Harvard lawyer who worked for Senator Chuck Schumer and was first appointed to the FTC at age 36 without accomplishing anything but termiting her way into bureaucracy.

So it wasn’t completely clear that Justice Brown even knew what case she was blathering about.

Jackson’s cerebrally suspect reasoning spurred a rare rebuke from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who snapped:

KAVANAUGH: “Independent agencies are not accountable to the people. They’re not elected as Congress and the President are, and are exercising massive power over individual liberty and billion-dollar industries. Once the power is taken away from the president, it’s very hard to get it back in the legislative process. I think broad delegations to unaccountable independent agencies raise enormous constitutional and real-world problems for individual liberty.”

Last year, in the unrelated Loper Bright case, SCOTUS ended the so-called “Chevron Doctrine,” another anti-democratic, bureaucracy-protecting, liberal court innovation from the 1980’s, which required courts to defer to the decisions of “doctors and economists and PhD’s” in administrative agencies like the EPA, which immediately began declaring federal wetlands protection over dewy moist areas in people’s front yards and licensing how much carbon dioxide middle schoolers were allowed to emit after their burrito lunch.

But the Court ended Chevron, which knocked one leg out from under the deep state’s stool. If they similarly reverse or restrict Humphrey’s Executor, that would wipe out another leg, and the stool will probably topple over, along with all the morbidly obese bureaucrats squatting on it.

⚖️ Together, Humphrey’s and the now-defunct Chevron Doctrine formed a protective duo: Humphrey’s shields agency bureaucrats, and Chevron shielded the substance of their actions. One analyst noted that this duo “paved the way for the modern administrative state” by limiting presidential (Humphrey’s) and judicial (Chevron) meddling in agency activities.

You know how people always complain that, “you can elect Democrats or Republicans, but nothing ever changes?” This is why.

Assuming the Supreme Court expands the president’s power to rein in the agencies and fire the people who work for him, elections will suddenly become much more meaningful. Things will start changing, fast. That sounds good now— but what about the long-term risks? Agency independence cuts both ways. When Democrats get back into power, will the seesaw slam back the other way and knock us silly?

⚖️ That potential peril brings us to the gist, or nub, of the problem. The only reason an unrestrained president is so powerful —why Democrats keep calling Trump a “king”— is because Congress keeps delegating its lawmaking powers to Executive agencies. For example, during the pandemic, HHS (an executive agency) was empowered by laws that Congress passed to declare on its own: (1) whether an emergency existed and for how long, (2) which people and products got legal liability immunity, and (3) who could be coerced into taking the shots.

Those pandemic policies should never have been delegated to unelected bureaucrats. They should have been debated by lawmakers, in public, and voted on, so we would know who should be hounded out of office in disgrace. (Another recent example —this one SCOTUS stopped— was when Biden’s Department of Education tried twice to forgive half a trillion dollars in student loans. Again, Congress should be doing that kind of stuff.)

In short, the wheel of bureaucratic tyranny first began spinning when the lazy Congress started delegating its lawmaking authority to executive agencies, calling it “rulemaking”. That, in turn, threatened to make the president too powerful, so court cases like Humphry’s were needed to constrain runaway presidential power.

The real answer —and this is where the conservative Court has been headed ever since Trump 1.0— is to start forcing Congress to make its own laws, and to stop delegating the details to the Executive Branch. If Congress actually started obeying the non-delegation doctrine (or the Court’s related ‘major-questions’ doctrine), the entire debate over Humphrey’s Executor and bureaucratic independence would evaporate.

The good news is, this Court seems to get it. If there is a trendline running through its decisions since conservatives became the majority, it is a trend toward a pre-New Deal constitutional order closer to 1787 than 1935. That is why the Democrats are freaking out so hard about this seemingly wonky case. If Humphrey’s falls, and Slaughter’s job gets butchered, big changes will be afoot.

🔥🔥🔥

Speaking of ruffling expert feathers, on Sunday, CBS News breathlessly ran a story that, despite the framing, was unquestionably good news, headlined, “Appointment of controversial FDA official rocking agency like “an atom bomb,” scientists there say.” One anonymous FDA worker called Dr. Høeg “an extinction-level event.” But she doesn’t look very scary:

On Wednesday, President Trump installed Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg as acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which regulates new drug approvals and the supply chain for existing ones. She replaced Richard Pazdur, a career FDA scientist who became CDER’s director just three weeks ago, but rage-quit after CBER Director Vinay Prasad’s letter invited staff to resign if they didn’t agree with the FDA’s new gold-standard philosophy.

“Putting Tracy Beth in charge is like dropping an atom bomb,” one anonymous agency griper complained, without exaggeration. “It’s an extinction-level event. Tracy Beth Høeg has never supervised a drug review, never conducted a clinical trial. She doesn’t understand laws and regulations.” (The complainer also claimed “multiple top-level FDA officials” are also “preparing resignations.” Bye, Felicia! Self-deportation. And, what’s taking so long?)

All this hysteria seems overblown, even by delicate federal worker standards. Dr. Høeg has only been appointed as “acting director,” to a position that does not require Senate confirmation, so it is probably just temporary. She was already at CDER as a “senior advisor.” And they can hardly complain, since everyone is rage-quitting, leaving the department short-staffed.

Starting early in the pandemic, Dr. Høeg became nationally prominent and controversial as a well-credentialed, MIT-linked epidemiologist who first fought back against school closures and masks (especially on kids), and later questioned the jabs, especially for young people. Early this year, Dr. Høeg published a study finding masks don’t stop covid infections, for instance.

So, of course, they now call her an anti-vaxxer or a “vaccine skeptic,” even though neither of those things are actually true. (She recently defended the measles vaccine, for instance.) Traci’s real crime was refusing to go along with the consensus group.

Worse, Dr. Høeg also serves as FDA’s representative on the CDC’s vaccine committee. They trust her as far as they can throw Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). At Friday’s vaccine committee meeting, she asked why the U.S. recommends so many childhood shots when other developed countries have fewer, which caused six reporters to faint where they stood.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if they were sending out letters like Prasad’s and putting Dr. Høeg in charge just to make career termites quit? In other words, they are creating a fully legal but intolerable work environment because the deep state bureaucrats are so easily triggered.

🔥🔥🔥

It may not be “The Storm” the QAnon folks contemplated, but thanks to James O’Keefe, a whole-of-government storm of investigations into welfare-related fraud is underway. On Sunday, Tribal Business News ran a distraught story headlined, “SBA orders 8(a) firms to submit financial records by Jan. 5, raising stakes for tribal contractors.” An earlier fraud review has been expanded to the entire ‘minority small business’ portfolio.

The SBA’s 8(a) program is aimed at “small disadvantaged businesses,” generally meaning 51% “minority owned.” Among a slew of business development benefits, the biggest is federal contracting privileges, which helps them get sole-source contracts of up to $7 million each, with “lifetime caps” in the hundreds of millions per individual. According to the article, Indian (tribal) businesses alone got $23 billion in contract awards in 2023.

In case you were wondering, the 8(a) program itself is racist, a de facto racial spoils system, and is probably unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. Courts have been slowly whacking it back over the last ten years or so. I could write a whole post just on the problems with 8(a) and its litigation history. Needless to say, it’s a Democrat invention, and Dems keep propping it up.

A few weeks back, James O’Keefe of OMG —wearing an especially cunning disguise— broke the scandal with an undercover video of some diverse folks bragging about being 51% minority owners of companies with 8(a) no-bid contracts. They said it was easy, they do nothing more than pass contracts to subcontractors after depositing their cut. “I sit back, collect my percentage, and they do the work,” one subject said.

CLIP: OMG’s SBA 8(a) exposé video (21:09).

Anyway, this week, Trump’s SBA Director Kelly Loefler sent notices to all 8(a) companies, roughly 4,300 of them, requiring submission of three years of general ledgers, bank statements, payroll registers, employment records, and subcontracting agreements by January 5th, or risk losing access to the program. Submitting false information creates potential criminal liability for lying to federal employees.

Now, using AI, the SBA can actually do something with all those records. There is much speculation online about all the technical implications.

CLIP: SBA unleashes a storm of investigations against woke fraudsters (1:21).

Director Loefler is also investigating covid PPP loans. The covid loan investigation was fueled by the Minnesota Somali scammer scandal, and that investigation has now expanded across the entire state.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Dr. Oz, the new Medicare/CMS director, is also unleashing investigations, including into the Minnesota Somalis, who stole over $1 billion from Medicaid.

CLIP: Dr. Oz investigates Medicaid and housing fraud (1:34).

Dr. Oz set a deadline of the end of this month for Governor Walz to prepare and submit a “corrective plan” to prevent future fraud related to 14 federal programs. The threat, presumably, is withholding a federal funds amount so large it is likely measured in metric tons.

Late last week, White House Advisor Steven Miller described the Minnesota Somali scandal as the single greatest theft through welfare fraud in American history. Not only that, but “We believe the state government was fully complicit in the scheme,” he said. Astonishingly, at least 75% of the Somali population in Minnesota is on one or more welfare programs.

Mr. Miller vowed that the Trump Administration would fully investigate the fraud. There’s really no telling how far these scandals could reach. The amounts involved are incomprehensibly huge, which makes the operation highly attractive. Who might have been attracted to it?

Most ordinary Americans are looking at all this and wondering how widespread the graft must be. Under President Cabbage, corruption apparently exploded. The investigations are only beginning, and they touch multiple key political points, including welfare, race, immigration, official corruption, Democrat dirty tricks, and probably even Somali terrorists funded by Tim Walz’s rent subsidies.

Just think: two years ago, we would never have heard of any of this, even if the FBI had stopped prosecuting January 6th tourists for ten minutes and looked into these problems.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow morning, with a fresh, hot roundup of essential news and commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid

Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com