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Adoptive parents charged with murder, child abuse after 6-year-old girl’s remains found in backyard

WICHITA, Kan. (KWCH/Gray News) - A couple was arrested and charged after the remains of their 6-year-old adopted daughter were found in their backyard.

Investigators believe Kennedy Jean Schroer, whose birth name was Natalie Garcia, died in November 2020, when she was 6 years old. Her body was discovered in the backyard of her home in September.

Kennedy had been under the care of Crystina and Joseph Schroer since 2018.

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According to authorities, they received a call on Sept. 10. During the initial contact, officers discovered the possibility of human remains in the backyard of their home.


On Sept. 11, officers secured a search warrant on the property. During the search, a child’s remains were found in a trash bag.

On Sept. 27, DNA testing confirmed the identity of the remains were Kennedy.

Kennedy’s cause of death was probably suffocation and her manner of death was homicide, according to police.

Crystina Schroeder, 50, is charged with first-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping, four counts of child abuse (torture), felony theft, four counts of forgery, Medicaid fraud and desecration of a corpse.

Joseph Schroer, 53, is booked on four counts of child abuse (torture), liability for crimes of another, interference with law enforcement, felony theft and Medicaid fraud.
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Politician Question

1. If I am a Republican who serves a District that is 50/50 democratic and republican, is it my job to support and fight for my republican ideas or work to compromise with democrats?



2. What is the purpose of confirmation hearings? Is it my job to only vote for people that believe the same as me or am I supposed to vote for someone who is qualified, but may have wway different views?
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How Trump’s promise to abolish the Department of Education would work

The Washington Examiner spoke to three leading education policy experts, who explained how cutting the Education Department would work, if it is realistic, and what the effects would be.

“I think it’d be fine,” Frederick M. Hess, senior fellow and director of education policy studies for American Enterprise Institute said. “The Department of Education is extraordinarily bureaucratic. It creates extraordinary amounts of red tape for the nation’s schools, especially relative to the money it actually provides.”

Hess said that under the Obama and Biden administrations, the department became “a political entity frequently engaged in promoting particular ideological nostrums” which he called “massively problematic.” He added that the two Democratic presidents “make the best possible case for abolishing the department. So, yeah, I think downsizing the department, or even abolishing it, is certainly wholly sensible.”

It is more likely that a reconciliation bill is passed, which could defund a number of programs and bureaucratic positions. This would only require 50 votes in the Senate, with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance casting the tiebreaking vote. This type of bill is often used to make changes to federal spending in a way that aligns with the congressional budget resolution.

“Congress would also have to amend legislation that grants the Secretary of Education authority to make certain decisions to the new secretaries, or other officials,” Neal McCluskey, director of the CATO Institute's Center for Educational Freedom ,said.

A third option would be for Trump to use executive action to “move some functions out of” the department, Chester E. Finn Jr., distinguished senior fellow & president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute said.

“Eliminating the agency isn’t the same as eliminating the myriad programs that it runs, billions that it sends out, and multitudinous regulations that it enforces (mostly pursuant to laws enacted by Congress)," Finn, who is also Volkner senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, added. “Undoing those functions, programs, activities means dealing separately with the laws that created them — dozens and dozens.”

If the department is abolished, but its Congressionally-mandated functions are not, Finn said this would be “a mostly symbolic act” akin to simply “taking the name off the door.” Before the DoE was created in 1979, the now-defunct Department of Health, Education, and Welfare had an “education division that was virtually equivalent to the Dept of Ed without being a separate Cabinet department.”

Depending on how dissolving or reducing the DoE is executed, McCluskey said he thinks “the transition could be done in a couple of years, though three might be more realistic for the government.”

He said that if K-12 programs are eliminated, they could likely be block-granted to the states “and either kept that way and administered by some other department, or dissolved over maybe six years, with the initial amount reduced by a third every other year.”

“Student aid programs could be similarly phased out, starting with caps on grants and loans and reducing those every two years,” McCluskey added.

How many federal workers would this affect?
There are currently over 4,000 bureaucrats employed by the Department of Education. If the department were to be eliminated entirely, Finn estimated that only “a few hundred — attached to the 'office of the secretary,' 'office of the deputy secretary,' etc. — would be eliminated. But the rest are attached to programs and functions.”

McCluskey said that much of the reduction “depends on the characteristics of each employee” and whether they have federal job protections. Theoretically, every DoE employee could “simply be transferred” to another department, particularly if that department absorbs the program they are attached to.

However, McCluskey said, “Presumably, there would be some redundancies with the merging department,” and this may impact which bureaucrats would be transferred and which would be terminated.

On the other hand, Hess said that through a reconciliation bill, “you could eliminate funding for many, or most of those positions.”

What programs would be immediately cut?
The Department of Education has spent about $80 million in 2024. Its main functions include developing and implementing policy, providing federal funding to schools, enforcing civil rights, supporting special education, managing student financial aid, performing data collection and research, and providing resources for teacher development.

To eliminate many programs, Finn said that Congress would have to terminate, rewrite, or amend the authorizing legislation “or stop funding via the appropriations process,” but mentioned there would be “serious pushback” against this from “interests that benefit from the money.”

Hess identified three key programs that the DoE spends the most on and could be eliminated if the department was abolished: Pell Grants for low-income students to go to college, Title I, which gives money to school districts serving low-income children, and special education, which provides funding for children with special needs.

The government allocated $24.5 billion for the Pell Grant in 2024, $18.6 billion for Title I, and over $15 billion for special education. McCluskey said that the savings “could be used for debt reduction.”

One of the “complexities” in eliminating these programs, Hess said, is that “not only do Democrats not want to cut” them, but neither do Republicans for the most part “even though they don’t like the federal footprint and all the federal rules.”

The move would not affect school lunches, as the National School Lunch Program is handled by the Department of Agriculture, and would have little-to-no impact on summer care or transportation as those are mostly handled by state and local governments with minimal federal funding, except for emergency relief.

What would replace the Education Department?
It is unlikely that an outright abolition would happen, because, as Hess said, “you're not going to get seven Democrats to vote to abolish the department of education no matter what.”

However, many of its responsibilities can be transferred to other departments. For example, Finn said “There’s been talk of transferring the student loan mess to [the] Treasury.”

McCluskey noted that, “The first Trump administration proposed merging the Education Department and the Department of Labor, creating a new department. Education could also be rolled into Health and Human Services, basically recreating what existed before the Education Department: the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.”

“The parts could be sent to various other departments; student aid to Treasury, the Office of Civil Rights to [the Department of Justice], and K-12 functions to HHS,” he added. “Or, though very unlikely, all the programs [the Department of Education] administers could be dissolved, and the Department just eliminated.”


Finn also speculated that, if not the DOJ, the Office for Civil Rights could fall under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s jurisdiction as Trump’s appointee for the Department of Health and Human Services under something similar to what used to be the HEW.

Would some states be impacted more than others?
The matter of which states would be most impacted largely comes down to which receive the most money from Title I, due to a higher concentration of low-income students, as well as special education.

McCluskey noted that “Poverty rates tend to be highest in southern states,” so they may face a disproportionate loss of federal K-12 funding.

Finn said, “POOR states would suffer the most, states full of poor folks (many of whom I believe voted for [Trump]!)”

Hess, on the other hand, noted that the overall impact would be “modest” because “in K-12 education, the federal share of spending is really very small, which is part of what makes all the federal overreach and rules so problematic.”

He said that “the feds only kick in about 10 cents on the dollar” overall, and that’s just two cents on the dollar for Title I. “So we're not really talking about huge impacts from what might be realistic cuts.”

“It's not clear that you would have big winners or losers among the states, because it tends to be earmarked based on which kids have been identified with special needs… some states might lose slightly more, some slightly less,” Hess added, but in terms of “the actual dollars involved, there's not going to be a huge difference, one state to the next.”

Would this mean a tax increase?
The Department of Education currently counts for around 10% of total education funding. If the states wanted to “compensate” for this, Finn says, “they’d definitely have to raise taxes.”

However, McCluskey and Hess paint a more optimistic picture. They suggested that states would be able to spend even less on education, and would therefore not result in tax increases.


“Were [the Department of Education] to disappear, state DoEs could likely be shrunk, because they are tasked with complying with federal dictates and helping to administer federal programs,” McCluskey said. “The federal government adds to state administrative burdens in exchange for federal funds.”

To the same point, Hess said many states employ up to a “couple hundred bureaucrats" whose jobs largely focus on "ensuring reporting requirements so that their schools get clean audits."

HawkCast Ep. 124 Bo Bassett COMMITS, WBB UPSETS No. 4 USC, Men Get BOILED

Ross and I breakdown Iowa MBB's loss to Purdue, missing Owen Freeman the rest of the year, Bo Bassett's commitment to the Hawkeyes, Cooper DeJean playing in the Super Bowl this weekend, and Adam joins to share thoughts on Caitlin Clark's jersey retirement as well as Iowa WBB's upset win over No. 4 USC.

Josh Dix and Payton Sandfort come out on a mission, Purdue is just too damn good, remaining schedule for the men, where Bo Bassett is expected to wrestle for the Hawkeyes, how Bassett's recruitment came together for Iowa, Eliot's hometown pride for DeJean, how Cooper has impacted the way the Eagles have played this year, Lucy Olsen rises to the occasion, shout out to Addison O'Grady, JuJu Watkins isn't quite in the same sphere as Caitlin yet, + more.

PODCAST:

MAGA monster comes for Joni Ernst

It’s remarkable how fast you can go from guest to entree at the big MAGA buffet.



Iowa U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst certainly knows.


Last week, she committed the grave offense of being a voice of reason. She told Real Clear Politics she had not made up her mind on Pete Hegseth’s nomination to become secretary of defense.




Ernst said she didn’t plan to campaign against Hegseth and wanted to see the confirmation process unfold. How unreasonable, a senator wanting to follow the Senate process before making a final decision. She’s a pivotal vote on the Armed Services Committee, which will be handling Hegseth’s confirmation.


But then, the MAGA warning light flashed, and all hell broke loose.


Fox News showed a series of X posts aimed at Ernst.


Donald Trump Jr pointed out Ernst had voted to confirm Joe Biden’s pick for defense secretary, Lloyd Austin. He suggested Ernst may be “in the wrong political party.”





Somebody called Wall Street Mav called Ernst a “neocon.” Gasp. And suggested she face a conservative primary opponent in 2026. Right-wing radio host Steve Deace bragged he could be the one to topple Ernst in that primary. Or maybe double Arizona failure Kari Lake could return to her Iowa roots. Sure.


Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA (his turn signal blinking toward the abyss) accused Ernst of “leading the charge” against Hegseth.


Ernst is the first woman combat veteran elected to the U.S. Senate. Pete Hegseth is a Fox News personality who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s also been overserved many times. He’s vowed to quit drinking if confirmed.


A woman has accused Hegseth of sexual assault. This, alongside multiple reports of sexual misconduct and mismanagement of veterans’ groups he led.


But MAGA has decided he’s the sort of strong, rugged, take-no-prisoners guy we need to make America tough again. He’ll fix the “woke” military, whatever that means.


Hegseth said women don’t belong in combat. Ernst is a combat veteran. He’s accused of sexual assault. Ernst is a sexual assault survivor. So, Ernst was supposed embrace this guy’s nomination? Be impressed by his raw manliness? Suddenly I could use a drink.


But by Monday, after a weekend of MAGA bludgeoning, Ernst took a step back. She met again with Hegseth, was encouraged and said the allegations against him won’t count unless victims step forward.


“As I support Pete through this process, I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources,” Ernst said.


But after that process, will you vote for him? She didn’t really go there. But it’s likely she’ll vote to confirm.


It’s disappointing, but not unexpected. I wish she would have said, “Pete Hegseth? I wouldn’t put that guy in charge of latrines. I wouldn’t hand him the keys to the nation’s military if he was the last man on earth. And that last man thing sounds pretty good right now.”


What Ernst said last week was spot on. If this guy wants to become secretary of defense, he’s going to have to show he’s capable. That’s what the confirmation process is for. Ernst wanting to wait and see the show makes sense.


Only one top Iowa Republican defended her, Rep. Ashely Hinson. But Hinson also had to do her duty and say Hegseth is a “strong pick.”


Yes, I know. Ernst played her own role in creating the MAGA monster. Now she got a glimpse of what happens when it turns on you. No loyalty and genuflecting before the dear leader can save you. Toe the MAGA line, or else. This is the party of freedom.


(319) 398-8262; todd.dorman@thegazette.com

At the Hegseth hearing, GOP senators covered themselves in shame

A gross dereliction of duty on the part of the Republican-controlled Senate and the Trump-directed FBI. That is a harsh but unavoidable assessment of the confirmation hearing for Pete Hegseth to serve as Donald Trump’s defense secretary. Both institutions should be ashamed of their performance — Republican senators most of all, as, bullied by the president-elect and intimidated by deep-pocketed, no-holds-barred pressure campaigns, they abdicate their constitutional advice-and-consent responsibility.


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I have witnessed many contentious confirmation hearings over the years and watched as the system has become increasingly partisan and vitriolic. But the Hegseth hearing represents a new low in that diminished process.
The seriousness and breadth of the allegations against him — from sexual assault to excessive drinking to sheer lack of experience — demand the most searching and responsible of inquiries. Instead, the Hegseth nomination has largely produced reflexive party-line salutes.


What unfolded during Tuesday’s hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee was the continuation of a relentless lack of curiosity — an utter absence of willingness to take the constitutional role seriously — that has marked this nomination from the start. If the GOP goal is getting Hegseth across the finish line — well, mission accomplished, it appears. If the point was to determine whether he is fit for the job, abject failure.
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Hegseth, a former Fox News host, dismissed allegation after allegation against him as “anonymous smears.” But not all the allegations are anonymous, as Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) pointed out. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported this week that Republican Sens. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Susan Collins of Maine refused the opportunity to meet with the woman who claims Hegseth sexually assaulted her at a conference in 2017. (Hegseth, who was married to another woman at the time and had just fathered a child with the woman who later became his third wife, said the encounter was consensual.)
In any event, anonymous is not equivalent to untrue, and Hegseth did not — he could not — explain the astonishing array of accounts of his extreme public intoxication. Moreover, Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly observed, Hegseth simultaneously argued that his is a “redemption story” of a changed man who had overcome past problems and that he is the victim of a coordinated smear campaign. “It can’t be both,” Kelly said.


In one particularly laughable but illustrative moment, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin (Oklahoma) defended Hegseth against charges of drunkenness and womanizing by suggesting that his colleagues were equally culpable. “How many senators have showed up drunk to vote at night? Have any of you guys asked them to step down and resign from their job?” he asked. “And don’t tell me you haven’t seen it because I know you have. And then how many senators do you know have gotten a divorce for cheating on their wives?” Playing another round of whataboutism is not the way to determine fitness for duty.
In contrast to the behavior of previous nominees from both parties, Hegseth refused to meet with Democrats on the committee before the hearing. In contrast to the practice at previous hearings, Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) refused Democratic requests to allow senators more than a single seven-minute round of questioning. Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the committee’s ranking Democrat, noted that the confirmation hearing for Obama defense secretary Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator, stretched to three rounds of questioning. What did Wicker have to fear from allowing his colleagues across the aisle to try to do their jobs? This was an exercise of political brute force, not senatorial responsibility.
Only Wicker and Reed were permitted to review an FBI report that Reed described as “insufficient.” The FBI failed to question Hegseth’s second wife, despite her expressed interest in being interviewed. It didn’t speak to the woman who accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her — and was paid by him in exchange for executing a nondisclosure agreement. It didn’t obtain the forensic audit of a veteran’s organization Hegseth ran that found “evidence of gross financial mismanagement.”






Mayer reported that “the F.B.I.’s background investigation also failed to interview Fox News personnel who had described Hegseth to NBC News as smelling of alcohol on the job as recently as last fall. Instead, sources say that the Bureau settled for an interview with a public-relations official at Fox.”
The FBI’s role here is troubling, because the bureau is supposed to serve as the Senate’s chief source of reported and reliable information about the individuals whose nominations it is considering.
But as we have seen before, most notably in the confirmation of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, the FBI is caught, or has allowed itself to be caught, in an untenable situation: The bureau has argued that the scope of its inquiries is limited by the directions it is given, in this case by the Trump transition team. But the Trump team’s goal is to win confirmation, not to get to the truth of the matter — which makes a Trump-directed FBI investigation worse than meaningless; it makes it effectively a coverup. A responsible Senate that took its constitutional responsibilities seriously would not stand for this.


But that previous sentence assumes facts not in evidence. Most Republican senators are dutifully obedient to Trump and his demands, even if they privately know better. Those who might consider straying — that is, doing their jobs — are subjected to the threat of unbridled and well-financed attacks and the looming threat of a primary challenge. This is not a responsible Senate. It is a partisan and cowering one.

Federal judge in Maryland issues injunction on Trump’s birthright citizenship order

By David Nakamura
and
Silvia Foster-Frau
A federal judge on Tuesday indefinitely blocked President Donald Trump’s effort to curb birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign visitors, a decision that is likely to mean the executive order will not take effect as planned later this month.

U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman issued a preliminary injunction after a court hearing in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a lawsuit brought by civil rights groups aiming at stopping Trump’s order on the grounds that it violates the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.

The injunction applies nationally and will remain in place as the case is adjudicated. The Maryland lawsuit is one of at least six different federal cases brought against Trump’s order by a total of 22 Democratic-led states and more than half a dozen civil rights groups.


In issuing the injunction, Boardman said the plaintiffs would “very likely” succeed on the merits in their case against Trump’s order, which she said “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment.”
Boardman said Supreme Court precedent protects birthright citizenship.
“No court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation,” she said. “This court will not be the first.
The Trump administration is expected to appeal Broadman’s injunction, according to legal experts.
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4.1 million migrants​

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The Washington Post analyzed more than 4.1 million U.S. immigration court records from the past decade to find out where migrants come from and where they live once they arrive in the country.

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Boardman’s ruling came nearly two weeks after a federal judge in Seattle, overseeing another case, called Trump’s order “blatantly unconstitutional” and issued a 14-day restraining order that prevented Trump’s administration from moving forward. Another hearing in that case, brought by a coalition of four states, is scheduled for Thursday.


Trump’s order directs federal agencies, including the State Department and Social Security Administration, not to issue citizenship documents to children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants and foreigners on temporary work, student and tourist visas. Federal agencies also would be barred from accepting citizenship documents issued by states for children who do not qualify under the order.

White House officials said the order was scheduled to take effect Feb. 19. Only children born after the directive is in place would be denied citizenship, the officials said. Some studies project that more than 150,000 people a year would fall into that category.
The lawsuit in Maryland was filed by two nonprofit civil rights groups, CASA and the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, on behalf of five pregnant women in the United States whose children would not be granted citizenship under Trump’s order.


The 14th Amendment, approved by Congress in 1868, provides automatic citizenship to those born on U.S. soil who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the federal government, which has traditionally applied to nearly everyone other than the children of foreign diplomats.
White House aides said Trump’s order seeks to reinterpret the amendment because, they argue, immigrants in the country illegally and foreigners on temporary visas are not fully under the jurisdiction of the United States; therefore, their children should not be granted citizenship.
Most legal scholars reject such reasoning because immigrants and foreign visitors are subject to U.S. laws and can be arrested, jailed or deported.

In their complaint, the advocates for the pregnant women said Trump’s order is unconstitutional and would have the practical effect of denying their children their rights and thrust families like into chaos.

Trump’s order is “causing real-world confusion, fear, real-world harm, for countless people today,” Joseph Mead, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told Boardman at the hearing. “This executive order is such a departure from settled law. It’s so abrupt and such as departure from what we’ve been doing for over a century.”
He added that: “People covered by the executive order are parents, people who have lived here for years and decades and are not temporary visitors. They are people we work with, who own the houses down the street, who made America their home. They are entitled to have their children have the same constitutional right to citizenship as every other child born in United States has.”
Justice Department attorney Eric Hamilton told Boardman that the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment had been misinterpreted and was being used as a loophole exploited by unauthorized immigrants and foreign visitors.
Boardman was appointed to the federal bench by then-President Joe Biden in 2021.

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This is how federal dollars should be allocated

Birth rates and local support of other Trump policies. That's how the DOT is going to prioritize funding as opposed to the population that is served or the tax dollars that are generated. I wonder what the rationale is for this other than the fact that it heavily favors red states 🤔.

What Is ‘State Capture’? A Warning for Americans.

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly granted aides of Elon Musk access to the department’s payments system, which handles more than $5 trillion and sensitive data on Social Security and Medicare benefits and grants. The system also contains data on government contractors in direct competition with Mr. Musk’s own companies.
It was the latest troubling report of the administration’s interventions into practically every corner of the federal government that also include President Trump’s firing, sidelining and encouraging civil servants to quit.
The full picture of the government overhaul has yet to come into focus, and the contours of Mr. Musk’s role and mission in that transformation remain sketchy. (On Monday, President Trump tried to offer some clarity, saying that “Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval.”)
But the cumulative effect of these stories offers at best a complicated answer to what should be an uncomplicated question: Who exactly is running the federal government?
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It’s troubling enough not to be able to answer emphatically with “democratically elected leaders.” Even more troubling is the possibility that the actual answer is Mr. Musk — the world’s richest man — and other unaccountable, unelected, unconfirmed allies cozy with the president.
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Political economists have a name for that: state capture. State capture occurs when wealthy private interests influence a government to such a degree that they can freely direct policy decisions and public funds for their own benefit or for the benefit of their ideological fellow travelers (or both).
Revelations of this especially pernicious, widespread form of corruption have occurred in other countries — a striking example occurred in the country of Mr. Musk’s birth, South Africa — and they offer cautionary tales for democratic governments everywhere.
The details vary by context, but the political scientist Elizabeth David-Barrett lays out three general mechanisms of state capture. They now sound familiar: shaping the rules of the game through law and policy; influencing administrative decisions by capturing the budget, appointments, government contracts and regulatory decisions; and disabling checks on power by dismantling accountability structures like the judiciary, law enforcement and prosecution, and audit institutions like the inspectors general and the media.
Some of these strategies could come straight from the Project 2025 playbook or Trump administration executive orders. This should disturb all Americans. According to Ms. David-Barrett, state capture creates broad, long-lasting systemic inequality and diminished public services. Changing the rules of the game to allow such collusion to flourish, she writes, “leaves those few holders of economic power in a strong position to influence future political elites, consolidating their dominance in a self-perpetuating dynamic.”

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Mr. Musk’s recent stand against U.S.A.I.D., the federal agency responsible for administering foreign and development assistance since 1961, could have come directly from the state capture playbook — only often more brazen in intent. “U.S.A.I.D. is a criminal organization,” Mr. Musk posted over the weekend. “Time for it to die.” In that time, the agency’s website went offline, and its top two security officials were placed on administrative leave after refusing to allow members of Mr. Musk’s team access to secure U.S.A.I.D. systems. Finally, on Monday, Mr. Musk said that he had consulted Mr. Trump and that “we’re shutting it down.” (On Monday, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced that he is the acting administrator of the agency.)
The example from South Africa was detailed in a 2016 report actually called “State of Capture” from the country’s public protector, Thulisile Madonsela.
It described how, over a number of years, billions of dollars of public funding went into the pockets of a few elites, instead of supporting struggling health services and education systems. Ms. Madonsela’s office had received a series of allegations that the Guptas, a wealthy Indian family with deep business ties in South Africa (the Guptas have denied wrongdoing), had successfully pressured the president and other top officials into removing or appointing ministers of state-owned entities, “resulting in improper and possibly corrupt award of state contracts and benefits to the Gupta family’s businesses.”
State capture is not a condition endemic to post-apartheid South Africa. The so-called Operation Car Wash investigation in Brazil, for example, revealed secret, illicit relationships on the scale of state capture.
So what’s to be done in countries that face the threat of state capture?
First, as in South Africa, conduct a high-profile investigation run by elements of the government not yet captured. Though the United States has no office of the public protector, several federal government watchdog agencies could flex their investigative powers. Mr. Trump already culled as many as 17 inspectors general, but other agencies, including the Congressional Research Service, Government Accountability Office or the Congressional Budget Office, could step up.
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Second, opposition leaders must raise alarms. Making the case that this is not run-of-the-mill, pay-to-play corruption will draw the scrutiny needed to raise the alarms. Democrats have been relatively silent since Jan. 20. State capture offers the emergency message largely missing as we enter the new administration’s third week.
Finally, descriptions of state capture must speak directly to its victims: the American people. “If we are guilty of underdescribing state capture in the media, it is perhaps a guilt that lies in our failure to draw a blunt connection between political jargon and real human beings,” the South African political analyst Eusebius McKaiser wrote in 2017. “We need simpler and more visceral depictions of the meaning of corruption and the opportunities it costs, including the grandest scale of corruption, which is all that state capture picks out.”
Mr. McKaiser demonstrated how it’s done. When a 5-year-old boy drowned in feces in a dilapidated pit toilet at his school while wealthy businessmen accused of siphoning money away from building things like school toilets, Mr. McKaiser simply declared that the student “died because of state capture.”
Americans should know who is in charge of their national government. If they can’t answer that simple question, government officials and civil society must recognize warning signs of state capture and take back what is ours.

Trump’s Gaza plan would violate international law, experts say.

President Trump’s proposal for the United States to take over Gaza, transfer its population to Egypt and Jordan and redevelop it into the “Riviera of the Middle East” would unquestionably be a severe violation of international law, experts say.

Forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity. The prohibition against forced deportations of civilians has been a part of the law of war since the Lieber Code, a set of rules on the conduct of hostilities, was promulgated by Union forces during the U.S. Civil War. It is prohibited by multiple provisions of the Geneva Conventions, and the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II defined it as a war crime.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court lists forcible population transfers as both a war crime and a crime against humanity. And if the displacement is focused on a particular group based on their ethnic, religious or national identity, then it is also persecution — an additional crime. (Because Palestine is a party to the International Criminal Court, the court has jurisdiction over those crimes if they take place within Gaza, even if they are committed by citizens of the United States, which is not a member of the court.)
When Mr. Trump was asked how much of Gaza’s population he wanted to move, he said, “all of them,” adding, “I would think that they would be thrilled.” And when he was pressed on whether he would force them to go even if they did not want to, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t think they’re going to tell me no.”
Janina Dill, the co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, said in a statement that forcing Gazans to leave would be a crime: “The scale of such an undertaking, the level of coercion and force required, hence the gravity, make this a straightforward crime against humanity.”
It would be a further, severe violation for the United States to permanently take over the territory of Gaza. The specifics of that violation would depend partly on whether Palestine is considered a state, said Marko Milanovic, a professor of international law at the University of Reading in England. The United Nations has recognized Palestinian statehood, but the United States has not.
The prohibition on one state annexing all or part of another state’s territory is one of the most important, foundational principles of international law. “There’s a clear rule,” Professor Milanovic said. “You cannot conquer someone else’s territory.” It is rare for states to violate that rule, and when they have, as in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the response has been widespread global condemnation.
Aggression, which the International Criminal Court defines as a state using force “against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations,” is also a crime. The court would not be able to prosecute Mr. Trump or other U.S. officials for that crime, because unlike with other war crimes, it can only prosecute aggression if it is committed by a citizen of a member state. But lack of jurisdiction would not mean that the conduct itself is legal.
And even if Gaza is not considered part of a state, U.S. annexation of the territory would still violate the civilian population’s right to self-determination. The International Court of Justice has ruled twice that the Palestinian people are entitled to that right within Gaza.
“If you take it without their consent, you’re violating their right to self-determination,” Professor Milanovic said. “There’s really no doubt about that.”
Mr. Trump seemed unconcerned with how his proposal might be viewed by the institutions that underpin the international legal system, and he has shown little interest in having the United States participate in those institutions. On Tuesday, he signed an executive order calling for a general review of U.S. funding for and involvement in the United Nations, raising questions about the U.S. commitment to that global body. He also withdrew the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Even if Mr. Trump’s Gaza plan ultimately does not move forward, his attitude toward international law could have serious consequences for U.S. interests around the world, Professor Dill said.
“Trump is just casually making major international crimes into policy proposals,” she said. “He just normalizes violating, or proposing to violate, the absolute bedrock principles of international law.”
By appearing to disregard the value of those rules, Mr. Trump could send a message that he is not strongly committed to defending them in other contexts, such as a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Professor Dill said.
“If we live in a world where conquest is normalized and the legal rule is simply set aside, we live in a completely different world, in a world that’s incredibly dangerous also for Americans,” she said.
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