Lazy Saturday Reads: Families Belong Together

Good Morning!!

Today, while Trump plays golf and plots his takeover of the Supreme Court, tens of thousands of Americans will be marching against his evil fascist policy of separating children from their parents and locking them in cages. If you’re going to a march, I’ll be there with you in spirit.

They are even having a rally in Antler, North Dakota, population 28.

The largest one is expected to be in Washington D.C.

The Washington Post: Tens of thousands expected to protest Trump’s immigration policy during Washington rally.

It took 13 days to organize Saturday’s demonstration against the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy and the detention of children and families. It was the fastest that organizers could patch something together.

They guessed about 5,000 people would attend.

The National Park Service is now prepared for 10 times that — 50,000 people — to rally outside the White House and march on the Department of Justice, according to a permit issued this week. Demonstrators will demand an end to family detentions and the reunification for at least 2,500 children separated from their parents at the country’s southern border.

Several speakers, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton,” and actors America Ferrera and Diane Guerrero, will take the stage at Lafayette Square to kick off the protest, which begins at 11 a.m. People who have lived through the Holocaust, Japanese internment camps and Trump’s family separation policy are expected to speak.

About 750 similar protests have been planned throughout the country in every state, from big cities such as New York and Los Angeles to tiny ones such as Antler, N.D., population 28.

“This moment is an inspiring reminder that the majority of this country is appalled at what’s being done in our name,” said Anna Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org, which is co-sponsoring the event. “This is absolutely bigger than politics. This is about right and wrong.”

The Trump administration is now claiming they can hold families in detention centers for as long as they want to. NBC News: Trump administration says it will detain migrant families for as long as it takes to prosecute them.

The Justice Department urged a federal judge Thursday to let the government detain migrant families for long periods, a critical part of President Donald Trump’s plan for ending the practice of separating children from their parents at the border.

“The emergency currently existing on the Southwest border requires immediate action,” said the government’s filing, asking the court “to help address this urgent problem.”

Since 1997, an order from a federal district judge in California has set limits on how long children can be detained by immigration authorities. Originally intended to protect only unaccompanied minors, it was amended in 2015 to cover children held with their parents. Under the order, children must generally be moved to an approved facility for minors within 20 days.

As long as that limit remains in force, Justice Department lawyers said, the government must either separate the child from the parents or release the family members while they wait for their immigration hearing. But release is not a desirable option, the government said, because many families fail to show up for their hearings and simply remain in the country illegally.

I don’t think that’s going to go over too well with the judge or the attorneys defending Flores decision. I’m surprised more Justice Department lawyers haven’t resigned rather than defend Trump’s evil policy.

Meanwhile, women are facing a fight to save our rights to control our own bodies. Rebecca Traister at The Cut: Summer of Rage. White men are the minority in the United States — no wonder they get uncomfortable when their power is challenged.

It shouldn’t have been such a shock. After all, many of those most painfully poleaxed by the news of Anthony Kennedy’s retirement on Wednesday were the same ones who’d always understood the stakes; we knew that this was the risk, we’ve been scared for a long time. We knew that if it hadn’t been Kennedy it would have been Ginsburg or Thomas, and that it may still be. Yet there we were. Panicking. Nauseated. Heads and hearts pounding. Reminded, once again, that this country, our purported representative democracy, is ruled by a powerful minority population.

This too has been clear for a long time: that protecting the influence of that ruling minority — white men — has been the national priority from the country’s very founding. But these days, it’s easy to feel it in a way that underlines why we say that power is in someone’s grip: because the sensation on Wednesday was of just that, a grip so tight and unyielding that all the breath was being squeezed out.

Democrats have won the popular vote in four of five of the elections held since 2000, yet have only occupied the White House for two terms. Meanwhile, Republicans, as Jonathan Chait wrote Wednesday, are “increasingly comfortable with, and reliant on, countermajoritarian power.” Of course, as Chait outlines in his column, the Electoral College was intentionally designed to empower a minority: those in less populous areas of the country who wanted to protect the institution of slavery. The documents that encoded the participatory democracy of which Americans tend to be so proud expressly barred the electoral, civic, and economic participation of the nonwhite and the non-male.

White men are at the center, our normative citizen, despite being only around a third of the nation’s population. Their outsize power is measurable by the fact that they still — nearly 140 years after the passage of the 15th Amendment, not quite 100 years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, and more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts — hold roughly two-thirds of elected offices in federal, state, and local legislatures. We have had 92 presidents and vice-presidents. One-hundred percent of them have been men, and more than 99 percent white men.

But it’s not just in the numbers; it’s also in the quotidian realities of living in this country. The suffocating power of our minority rule is evidenced by the fact that we’re always busy worrying about the humanity — the comfort and the dignity — of white men, at the same time discouraging disruptive challenge to their authority.

Read the rest at the link above. It’s powerful–especially her defense of Maxine Waters and her condemnation of Chuck Shumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Bernie Sanders for trying to silence her.

This piece at Slate expresses what many of us are feeling right now: The America We Thought We Knew Is Gone, by Lili Loofbourow

Because countries are not people, it’s tricky to translate whatever “loving one’s country” means—it’s quite abstract—into the language of heartbreak. It sounds melodramatic. What can heartbreak mean as a civic matter? And yet it is what I feel.

A corrupt but weak president—this has been my comfort, his weakness—has been given a gift that will make him strong. After upholding the travel ban, weakening labor unions, and allowing crisis pregnancy centers to misrepresent themselves to women seeking help, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he was retiring before the midterm elections. That decision empowers a reality-television star who lost the popular vote by millions to reform the Supreme Court for at least a generation—a court that rather than rebut his claim to power has affirmed it. In his own branch, he asked James Comey for a loyalty oath and lamented not getting one from Jeff Sessions, whom he has repeatedly condemned for recusing himself in the Russia investigation, saying he never would have hired him as attorney general had he known. There is every reason to think he will do the same for a Supreme Court nominee. When Neil Gorsuch—who took the seat Mitch McConnell withheld from Merrick Garland—seemed to distance himself from the man who offered him the robes, Donald Trump reportedly considered pulling the nomination. Trump has said he will pardon himself if he needs to, a controversial stance that would likely need approval from the high court. Now he has been given a way to assure it. He holds the power over the person who can rubber-stamp him into invulnerability.

The capitulation of two branches of government to a terrifying third, elected by a minority, is not how our government was envisioned. That is frightening. It is also, depending on the America you want to live in, painful.

The problem isn’t simply that Trump—who styles himself a “law and order” president—values neither: He objected to the Central Park Five’s going free, despite the DNA evidence proving their innocence. He wanted their false imprisonment. It isn’t just that he advocates against due process, tars asylum applicants as criminals, and characterizes even their children as an “infestation.” It isn’t simply that he sees black men as intrinsically guilty, the same as brown refugees. It’s that he shouts about law and order while upholding the immunity of the rich and the cruel: He pardoned Joe Arpaio, who tortured undocumented immigrants in unlivable tent cities he openly called concentration camps, and, in pardoning Dinesh D’Souza, has signaled he will pardon his cronies if they are convicted for illegally helping him.

This is open corruption, and it has been openly embraced.

That fills me with grief, but my grief can’t make it untrue. And if this benthic sadness has any value, it’s that clarity. There is no more equivocating to do. You don’t have to equivocate about Trump’s corruption—or Wilbur Ross’, or Scott Pruitt’s. You don’t have to parse whether a “falsehood” is really a “lie.” It is simply true that the president is corrupt and that his supporters celebrate his corruption. That twisted power has enfeebled the institutions that depend on the very things the president would call weak—honesty and honor and service. As those institutions collapse, so does a polity capable of reasoning without them.

Head over to Slate to read the rest.

That’s all I have. Whatever you do today, may the Goddess be with you. Take care of yourselves.

Thursday Reads: Dark Days Ahead for America

Moneta Sleet Jr. (American, 1926–1996). Rosa Parks, Dr. and Mrs. Abernathy, Dr. Ralph Bunche, and Dr. and Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr. leading marchers into Montgomery, 1965, printed circa 1970. Gelatin silver print, 13 3/8 x 10 3/4 in. (34 x 27.3 cm). Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of the Johnson Publishing Company, 426:1991. © Johnson Publishing Company, LLC

Good Morning!!

As of today, we still live in a constitutional democracy. We cannot know how much longer that will be the case. We can pretty much assume that one of our institutions, the Supreme Court will no longer protect democracy. In fact, Mitch McConnell and Anthony Kennedy may have destroyed the Court as a protector of our democracy forever, or at least for the foreseeable future. We’ll know soon.

Where can non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual Americans turn now for relief? I don’t know, but I do think we must look to the human rights heroes who fought for our rights, especially the women who did so much and yet have been ignored by history: women who worked within a male-dominated system to promote change.

USA Today, February 16, 2018: The unsung heroes of the civil rights movement are black women you’ve never heard of.

On that historic August day in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. told us his dream. We didn’t get to hear what the women of the civil rights movement dreamed of, because none spoke at length during the official program of the March on Washington.

Daisy Bates

Daisy Bates, a leader in the movement to end segregation in Arkansas and guide for the nine students who integrated Little Rock’s Central High in 1958, gave a brief pledge on Aug. 28, 1963, before the “Tribute to Negro Women Fighters for Freedom,” an addition to the program meant to assuage black women who felt their voices were being marginalized and their contributions overlooked.

The civil rights movement could not have happened without women. They were grassroots organizers, educators, strategists and writers. They built organizational infrastructure, developed legal arguments and mentored young activists. They fought ardently against the forces of racism, but they also battled another form of oppression: sexism.

“There were hundreds of unnamed women who participated in the movement,” said Barbara Reynolds, a journalist and minister whose recordings of King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, are the basis of the activist’s posthumous memoir, My Life, My Love, My Legacy. “It was not just a few leaders — it was women … who really put their mark on history.”

“Dr. King was a chauvinist,” Reynolds said. Men like him “could not assert their manhood in the general society, because they would be killed if they stood up for anything,” so they asserted their masculinity in other ways within their own community.

It was the same uphill battle we are still fighting. Women and minorities are the ones who will be most hurt by what is happening.

We can also look to the suffragettes, the women’s rights activists of the 1960s and 70s, and the women who fought for gay rights even though their efforts were ignored by the men who got the credit.

White male journalists who don’t stand to lose as much are already minimizing the horrors to come. I wonder how they’ll feel when Trump succeeds in cracking down on the press?

Example: Brian Stelter’s response to this tweet by Amy Siskind:

I wonder how he’ll feel when Trump cracks down on the press with help from SCOTUS?

Check this out from Stelter:

Stelter doesn’t even bother to keep up with what’s happening in congressional races. Journalists do nothing but report on DC gossip and White House press releases. For the most part, they simply defenders of the status quo.

Another example: the WaPo’s Aaron Blake working to undermine Democratic arguments for postponing consideration of Kennedy’s replacement.

Blake tries to argue that somehow a presidential election is different from the election of Senators who will advise and consent Trump’s nominee.

The death of the Supreme Court isn’t going to affect people like Stelter and Blake right away, but it’s going to hit women and minorities hard. These journalists simply don’t care about us. What will they do when Trump comes for them? Will they expect us to support them? Of course. And the women who do that work will be ignored by history.

To be honest, we’ve seen in his recent opinions that Kennedy was joining the Court’s “Team Trump” anyway. Dahlia Lithwick writes: Why Anthony Kennedy Gave Up.

Barbara Gittings, mother of the gay rights movment

It was always more fan fiction than reality that Justice Anthony Kennedy was a moderate centrist. Democrats liked to soothe themselves with the story that Kennedy was a moderate because he’d provided the fifth vote to support continued affirmative action, reproductive rights, and gay rights and had strung the left along with the tantalizing promise of someday finding an unconstitutional political gerrymander. But we always knew that Kennedy was a conservative, indeed a very conservative conservative. Recall that in the famous study done in 2008 by Richard Posner and William Landes, “Four of the five most conservative justices to serve on the Supreme Court since the time of Franklin Roosevelt, including [John] Roberts and [Samuel] Alito, are currently sitting on the bench today.” And Kennedy? He was ranked in that study as the 10th most conservative justice in the past century.

To the extent we wrote paeans to Kennedy, it was for his occasional defections in areas that materially affect the lives of millions of people—women, minorities, LGBTQ couples, voters, Guantanamo detainees. And to be sure, each of those votes was well worth it. But we knew that for each such vote, there was a Bush v. Gore, a Citizens United, a Shelby County. And this term ended, perhaps fittingly, with Kennedy voting with the conservatives to hobble public-sector unions, to support mandatory arbitration clauses and voter purges, and to increase the unchecked power of an already imperial presidency. As Richard Hasen noted on Tuesday, Kennedy’s work here was clearly done. His concurrence in the Muslim ban case essentially signaled that Kennedy had all but given up on the notion of the judiciary as a meaningful check on the other two branches. As Hasen correctly called it, that concurrence landed as “a general statement of judicial powerlessness to solve social problems and an abdication of responsibility on the part of the courts to enforce key parts of the Constitution, in favor of a plea for self-restraint on the part of elected officials.” From a man who devoted a career to the proposition that the courts alone could fix things, it sounded in the key of “I’m out.”

British suffragettes Emmeline Pankhurst celebrating with Christabel Pankhurst and others after being released from prison. Photograph: Hulton Getty

There will be myriad theories and hypotheses about why Kennedy all but gave up on his project of centrism, civility, norm preservation, and institutional self-preservation this year. I’ve never heard him speak so eloquently as when he was defending those values and celebrating the extraordinary role American courts and judges have played to foster such values in democracies around the world. One senses in his cri de coeur in NIFLA, Tuesday’s abortion-speech case, that he is viscerally bothered by progressive states like California attempting to be “forward thinking” (read: authoritarian) when it comes to truth in advertising around reproductive options. One senses in his vision of uncivil discourse in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case a growing frustration with what he sees as impolite discussions about religious liberty issues he wanted us to discuss civilly. One senses in his concurrence in the travel ban case a sort of stutter-step apology to “an anxious world” that watches the norms and institutions of constitutional democracy crumble.

Read the rest at Slate.

Also from Slate: So Much for the Institutions, by Yascha Mounk

When Donald Trump was elected, “serious” social scientists argued that the institutions of the American Republic would constrain his power. The more historically literate among them even trotted out a quip Harry S. Truman reportedly made about Dwight D. Eisenhower: “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

1960s feminists march for abortion rights

As we now know, it hasn’t quite turned out like that. Though Trump’s White House certainly faced a steep learning curve in its first months—and remains deeply dysfunctional even now—the administration has gradually grown to be surprisingly effective at turning the president’s instincts into public policy. From immigration to trade, and from foreign policy to health care, the past months have brought big and worrying changes.

It is not just that the administration that is proving to be more effective than we might have hoped; it is also that the institutions meant to constrain it are proving far more pliant than we might have feared.

This is obviously true of the Republican Party. At the time of Trump’s election, smart observers debated whether party elites would continue to disdain and regularly oppose the president (as the optimists claimed) or whether Trump would prove capable of building a slate of his own candidates and gradually changing the nature of the party (as pessimists like me feared). The truth turned out to be much more radical than either the optimists or the pessimists predicted: Members of the conservative movement who had spent decades professing their commitment to balanced budgets and constitutional values proved willing to sell out their principles with astounding rapidity.

Read more at the link.

I have to be honest. I’m feeling really destroyed at the moment. Weeks of seeing the government kidnap children and mistreat asylum-seekers have been exhausting. I haven’t cried this much in many years. It has been a struggle just to write this much this morning, and I know it’s not very coherent.

I guess my only message is that women are the ones who are going to have to fight for our rights; what support we get from men is fine, but we are the ones on the firing line. I plan to look to the brave women who came before us–who fought hard for the rights we still have for the moment. For now, I plan to approach this problem the way I have always dealt with problems: read and educate myself.

Here’s a tweet that inspired me a bit this morning:

Let’s support each other Sky Dancers. We are facing dark days, but we are not alone.