Harvard’s challenge to Trump administration could test limits of government power

On one side is Harvard, the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, with a brand so powerful that its name is synonymous with prestige. On the other side is the Trump administration, determined to go further than any other White House to reshape American higher education.

Both sides are digging in for a clash that could test the limits of the government’s power and the independence that has made U.S. universities a destination for scholars around the world.

On Monday, Harvard became the first university to openly defy the Trump administration as it demands sweeping changes to limit activism on campus. The university frames the government’s demands as a threat not only to the Ivy League school but to the autonomy that the Supreme Court has long granted American universities.

“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” the university’s lawyers wrote Monday to the government. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

The federal government says it’s freezing more than $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard. The hold on funding marks the seventh time the Trump administration has taken such a step at one of the nation’s most elite colleges, in an attempt to force compliance with Trump’s political agenda. Six of the seven schools are in the Ivy League.

No university is better positioned to put up a fight than Harvard, whose $53 billion endowment is the largest in the nation. But like other major universities, Harvard also depends on the federal funding that fuels its scientific and medical research. It’s unclear how long Harvard could continue without the frozen money.

Thank you for referencing that article E. Pluribus Unum.

"Harvard’s challenge to Trump administration could test limits of government power"

FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument

Harvard is right about limited federal government power in general, but evidently doesn't understand that the problem is unconstitutional federal funding.

More specifically, not only did President Thomas Jefferson, in a State of the Union address, also Justice Joseph Story, both indicate that the states would first need to appropriately amend the Constitution in order for Congress to have the power to dictate, regulate, tax and spend for INTRAstate schooling purposes, something that the states have never done, but the Supreme Court has also clarified in general that Congress cannot tax and spend for things like intrastate schooling.

"The great mass of the articles on which impost is paid is foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of the public education, roads, rivers, canals, and such other objects of public improvement as it may be thought proper to add to the constitutional enumeration of federal powers [emphasis added].” —Thomas Jefferson: 6th Annual Message, 1806." (Jefferson is indicating that Congress cannot tax and spend in the name of intrastate infrastructure imo.)
"Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States." —Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
"The power to regulate manufactures is no more confided to congress, than the power to interfere with the systems of education [all emphases added], the poor laws, or the road laws of the states." —Justice Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution 2, 1833.
The congressional record shows that Rep. John Bingham, a constitutional lawmaker, had clarified the federal government's constitutionally limited powers as follows.
”Simply this, that the care of the property, the liberty, and the life of the citizen, under the solemn sanction of an oath imposed by your Constitution, is in the States and not in the federal government [emphases added]. I have sought to effect no change in that respect in the Constitution of the country.” —John Bingham, Congressional. Globe. 1866, page 1292 (see top half of third column)
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added]." —United States v. Butler, 1936.

Given the recent alleged massive federal spending fraud claimed by Mr. Musk, the main reason that elite desperate Democrats and RINOs provide unconstitutional federal funding for schools and many other things is probably to effectively buy votes to stay in power imo.

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