Acting Attorney Generals Can’t Overrule Presidents on Enforcement of Legal Orders.

Like most Democrats, [now-fired Acting Attorney General Sally] Yates objects to the president’s executive order. Fair enough. But she is not a political operative, she was a Justice Department official — thehighest such official. If her opposition to the president’s policy was as deeply held as she says, her choice was clear: enforce the president’s policy or quit.

Instead, she chose insubordination: Knowing she would be out the moment Senator Sessions is confirmed, she announced on Monday night that the Justice Department would not enforce the president’s order. She did not issue this statement on the grounds that the order is illegal. She declined to take a definitive position on that question. She rested her decision, rather, on her disagreement with the justice of the order. Now, she’ll be a left-wing hero, influential beyond her heretofore status as a nameless bureaucrat. But she had to go.

That’s what struck me about Yates’ letter. She says theexecutive order is not “lawful” but never specifies what law it breaks. That’s the sort of thing you would expect the attorney general of the United States to mention.

.. The work of the committee aides began during the transition period after the election and before Donald Trump was sworn in. The staffers signed nondisclosure agreements, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Trump’s transition operation forced its staff to sign these agreements, but it would be unusual to extend that requirement to congressional employees. Rexrode declined to comment on the nondisclosure pacts.

.. Rowe offered his familiar but no less accurate assessment that society will continue to have a skills gap as long as any job that involves working with your hands is seen as second-class or inferior to white-collar work.

“We right now have 5.8 million jobs that exist that nobody can fill right now,” Mike Rowe told theassembled Koch donors. “About 75 percent do not require four year degree. We have in our heads this idea that the best path for everybody is a four-year degree. We have ‘higher education’ and — we’re not crass enough to call it ‘lower’ education — we’ll call it ‘alternative’ education. Implicit in the language that we choose is the judgment and the ultimate outcome. It’s a reflection of the kinds of jobs we’ve rewarded, and the perception that these jobs are vocational consolation prizes. We’ve absolutely created a hierarchy in work.”

Everyone Hates Martin Shkreli. Everyone Is Missing the Point

Shkreli and Turing have claimed that hospitals and insurance companies will pay, while patients who can’t afford it will get a discount, or get it for free. And Nancy Retzlaff, Turing’s chief commercial officer, told the committee about her company’s efforts to get the drug to people who can’t afford it. The arrangement she described sounded like a hodge-podge, an ungainly combination of dizzyingly high prices, mysterious corporate bargaining, and occasional charitable acts—which is to say, it sounded not so much different from the rest of our medical system.

.. The Daraprim saga has as much to do with the Food and Drug Administration as with Shkreli: although the drug’s patent expired in the nineteen-fifties, the F.D.A. certification process for generic drugs is gruelling enough that, for the moment, whoever owns Daraprim has a virtual monopoly in America. (Overseas, it is much cheaper.)

.. “Congress has not really vested any authority for the F.D.A. over pricing, so we do not follow that.”

.. you don’t have to agree with his assessment in order to appreciate the service he has done us all. By showing what is legal, he has helped us to think about what we might want to change, and what we might need to learn to live with.