Trump-Appointed Judge Rules Against Musk and for Coastal Commission

No Harm, No Foul, Case Dismissed

Credit: Courtesy, U.S. Air Force Academy

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FOR WHOM THE GAVEL TOLLS: If stupidity were a criminal offense, I’d be public enemy number one. Many of us would have been sentenced to life behind bars.

I mention this because last Thursday, a federal judge — appointed to the bench by Donald Trump — told Elon Musk to pound sand with the free-speech lawsuit he filed against the California Coastal Commission last October. According to the judge’s ruling, the commissioners may have been guilty of first-degree stupidity — my words, not his — but not of infringing on Musk’s free-speech rights.

The case is of serious concern locally; it involves a significant difference of opinion among the commissioners about the number of Falcon 9 reusable rocket ships Musk and his company SpaceX are launching from Vandenberg. In the past two years, the number of launches has sky-rocketed—from 6 to 12 to 36 to 50 , and soon, to 100.

Bringing this to a boil are all the sonic booms triggered by all these launches. Some commissioners think Musk needs a bona fide development permit since only a small fraction of launches have any direct military or national security applications, and thus the Air Force should not grant him immunity from state permitting requirements.Therein lies the rub.

As usual, there’s more to it than that. Based on comments commissioners made at the October 10 hearing, they don’t much like Musk. They don’t approve of his checkered workplace safety record, his indifference to environmental protection, or his emergence as a transphobic evangelist. That he spent $300 million getting Trump elected, they absolutely hated. Several said as much as they voted 6-4 to deny Musk the “consistency determination” SpaceX needed in order to expand the permitted number of launches from 36 to 50.

Judge Stanley Blumenfeld | Credit: Wikimedia Commons

However accurate, such comments were way off base. They might as well have called Musk fat. Or made fun of his cap, which, by the way, looks exactly like something worn by the book burners in the movie Fahrenheit 451. Musk cried foul and sued the commission almost immediately; he sought punitive damages from the commissioners who talked smack.

Judge Stanley Blumenfeld threw the case out, noting in his 14-page opinion that Musk suffered no damages. His permits were approved; his launch numbers were expanded. He cited the rule rigorously observed on every basketball court in the world: “No harm, no foul.” Case dismissed. Translated into Latin, that’s either “Injuria sine damno” or “Nulla nox, nulla turpi.”

TheAir Force brass, however, who rely on Musk and SpaceX to get military satellites into outer space, simply overruled the Coastal Commission. Instantaneously, I might add.

In hindsight, of course, we’ve since learned that the commissioners who spoke so egregiously out of turn weren’t nearly as stupid as they seemed given the unfolding of more recent facts.

Musk has morphed into Lex Luther and the Joker combined. He’s not about fixing government; he’s about smashing it. Pulverizing it. And gloating about it. Sadly, no one has sued Musk for the real damage done.

Not being a government employee — or elected official — presumably, he enjoys no government immunity. And certainly, no judge in the land would be able to rule “Injuria sine damno.” Or even “Nulla nox, nulla turpi.”

As thehit-man-in-chief in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — not an actual government agency — Musk has pressed hard to eliminate pretty much any foreign aid funding, but especially from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The New York Times estimates thesecuts could translate to 1.65 million deaths within the year due to funding losses for HIV prevention and treatment. They could also mean 166,000 deaths from malaria. One million children will suffer from malnutrition. And 200,000 kids will get polio instead of a polio booster. This is real damage.

The reason for these cuts, of course, is to cover the $4.6 trillion in tax breaks Trump plans to institute. Half of those breaks will go for people earning $450,000 a year or more.

It’s worth noting that Trump had a Palestinian-born grad student — in the U.S. legally with all his legal papers — detained; the student broke no law. He did, however, express opinions deemed sympathetic to Hamas and hostile to the existence of Israel. For what it’s worth, I know many Jews who expressed similar sentiments.

Here’s my question: Given Musk’s recent revelation that Hitler didn’t kill any Jews — government bureaucrats, he said, did the killing — why didn’t Trump lock Musk up, too, and ship him back to South Africa? And what about Musk saying that Germany needed to get over the whole Holocaust thing — “There’s too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move on” — while at a pep rally for a far-right German Party just before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz Concentration Camp where 1.1 million Jews were killed by German troops, not government bureaucrats.

Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville | Credit: Wikimedia Commons

I know it’s poor form to belittle the neurodivergent, but those centurion salutes for which Musk is now rightfully infamous look exactly like the ones used by members of the National Socialist White People’s Party, a group of Nazi wannabe right-wing nuts in full flower when I was a kid growing up in the D.C. suburbs.

With friends like Musk, I would say, the Jews need no enemies. But maybe the same thing can be said of Trump. When a White supremacist mob took to the streets of Charlottesville in August 2017, they were chanting “The Jews will not replace us.” Trump famously excused them, saying, “There were good people on both sides.”

It’s worth noting that a district judge just ruled that Musk lacks the constitutional authority to dismantle USAID. He ordered Musk and Trump to reassemble the agency upon threat of contempt. It’s an important ruling. But it’s hard to put the pin back in a hand grenade after it’s exploded.

When it comes to stupid, I like to think I’ve done it all. But compared to these guys? Not even…