Tuesday Reads: Trump Nominates Brett Kavanaugh for SCOTUS
Posted: July 10, 2018 Filed under: Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, court rulings, Criminal Justice System, morning reads, SCOTUS, U.S. Politics, Women's Rights | Tags: abortion, Anthony Kennedy, Birth Control, Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, same-sex marriage, U.S. Supreme Court 44 Comments
The Four Justices, Nelson Shanks, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Good Morning!!
Last night thug “president” Trump did his ridiculous PT Barnum act with his nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court to replace Anthony Kennedy. Supposedly, Trump was deciding among about four candidates, but it turns out the fix may have been in all along.
https://twitter.com/GeoffRBennett/status/1016642192616706050
Has any other president made a deal with a Supreme Court Justice to appoint a chosen replacement?
https://twitter.com/Susan_Hennessey/status/1016649427577196544
From Politico: How a private meeting with Kennedy helped Trump get to ‘yes’ on Kavanaugh.
After Justice Anthony Kennedy told President Donald Trump he would relinquish his seat on the Supreme Court, the president emerged from his private meeting with the retiring jurist focused on one candidate to name as his successor: Judge Brett Kavanaugh, Kennedy’s former law clerk….
So even as Trump dispatched his top lawyers to comb though Kavanaugh’s rulings and quizzed allies about whether he was too close to the Bush family, potentially a fatal flaw, the president was always leaning toward accepting Kennedy’s partiality for Kavanaugh while preserving the secret until his formal announcement, sources with knowledge of his thinking told POLITICO.
I’m sure we’ll be learning more about this, and I hope Democrats respond aggressively.
Basic background on Kavenaugh
NBC News: Who is Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh?
President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick is no stranger to partisan politics: Before becoming a judge, he was helping make the case for the impeachment of Bill Clinton and later for the election of George W. Bush.
U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit judge Brett Kavanaugh
Twenty years ago, Kavanaugh’s story starts amid the highly politicized independent counsel investigation into Clinton. He worked for Starr as a young Yale Law graduate, first when Kenneth Starr was solicitor general and later in the Office of the Independent Counsel, where Kavanaugh was a key player in the slew of investigations into the Clintons, including the Whitewater scandal, the suicide of White House counsel Vincent Foster and Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.
The Starr Report to Congress laid out the details of Clinton and Lewinsky’s affair and findings of potential wrongdoing by the president. Kavanaugh was the primary author of the section on the grounds for possible impeachment, Starr would reportedly later say,because “that needed to be very carefully crafted, so I was looking to one of the office’s most talented lawyers — of superb and balanced judgment — to take the lead in drafting.” [….]
He was a member of the GOP legal team fighting to stop the recount in Florida to clear the way for Bush’s election against Al Gore in 2000, later taking a job in the Bush White House in 2001, where he’d serve for five years as counsel and later staff secretary until his confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 2006.
The Washington Post: Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court pick, has sided with broad views of presidential powers.
Brett M. Kavanaugh, the federal judge nominated by President Trump on Monday to the Supreme Court, has endorsed robust views of the powers of the president, consistently siding with arguments in favor of broad executive authority during his 12 years on the bench in Washington.
Justice Anthony Kennedy
He has called for restructuring the government’s consumer watchdog agency so the president could remove the director and has been a leading defender of the government’s position when it comes to using military commissions to prosecute terrorism suspects.
Kavanaugh is “an unrelenting, unapologetic defender of presidential power” who believes courts can and should actively seek to rein in “large swaths of the current administrative state,” said University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck, who closely follows the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Kavanaugh’s record suggests that if he is confirmed, he would be more to the right than the man he would replace, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, for whom he clerked. Kavanaugh has staked out conservative positions in cases involving gun rights, abortion and the separation of powers.
Read more details at both of those links.
What Kavanaugh Would Likely Do on the Court
Slate: How Brett Kavanaugh Will Gut Roe v. Wade
Kavanaugh is an obvious choice for Trump. A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, he has maintained staunchly conservative credentials without earning a reputation for being a bomb-thrower. Unless Republican Sen. Susan Collins grows a spine, which she won’t, he has a clear path to Senate confirmation. During his hearings, Kavanaugh will claim he cannot reveal his true feelings about Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion access. But there is little doubt that Kavanaugh will gut Roe at the first opportunity. Indeed, he has already provided a road map that shows precisely how he’ll do it.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Kavanaugh was forced to confront the abortion question in 2017 after the Trump administration barred an undocumented minor, known as Jane Doe, from terminating an unwanted pregnancy. The American Civil Liberties Union sued on Doe’s behalf, and the dispute came before a three-judge panel at the D.C. Circuit. Kavanaugh was joined on the panel by Judge Karen L. Henderson, an arch-conservative, and Judge Patricia Millett, a moderate liberal. Doe, who was being held in a federally funded Texas shelter, had already obtained the necessary judicial bypass to get an abortion. But the Trump administration refused to let her see an abortion provider, instead sending her to an anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy center.”
By that point, Doe would be about 18 weeks pregnant. Texas bans abortion after 20 weeks, and the procedure becomes more dangerous as the pregnancy advances. Moreover, the process of finding and verifying a sponsor for an undocumented minor frequently takes weeks or months. And Doe’s lawyers had already searched for a possible sponsor, to no avail. Kavanaugh’s ostensible compromise, then, was nothing of the sort. At best, it would force Doe to suffer through her unwanted pregnancy for at least two more weeks, increasing the odds of complications when she was finally able to obtain an abortion. At worst, it meant the government could run down the clock to the point that an abortion would become illegal.
Luckily for Doe, the full D.C. Circuit swiftly reversed Kavanaugh’s decision and allowed her to terminate her pregnancy, which she did. This move prompted Kavanaugh to write a bitter dissent explaining why the government’s bar on Doe’s abortion was not, in fact, an undue burden.
Read the rest at Slate.
The Daily Beast: Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s Supreme Court Pick, Is Probably the End of Abortion Rights and Same-Sex Marriage.
When President Trump Monday nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, he probably doomed the right to abortion, same-sex marriage, and maybe even contraception….
Future justice Elena Kagan arging a campaign finance reform case before SCOTUS
…while Kavanaugh’s record on women’s and LGBT rights is sparse, it gives good reason to suspect that he could be the swing vote to strike down Roe v. Wade, the abortion-rights case. This, after all, is what Trump promised in 2016: that Roe would be “automatically” be overturned should he be elected. And Kavanaugh has been praised by numerous right-wing organizations.
In the case of Garza v. Hargan, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that an undocumented teenage immigrant was entitled to obtain an abortion without having to obtain familial consent (as is required in several states).
Kavanaugh vigorously dissented, asking, “Is it really absurd for the United States to think that the minor should be transferred to her immigration sponsor ― ordinarily a family member, relative, or friend ― before she makes that decision?”
Those are strong words, endorsing not only parental consent rules but enforcing them in extreme circumstances. If you are looking for signals that a Justice Kavanaugh would limit or overturn Roe, Garza is a giant red flare.
There’s also a possibility that Kavenaugh might not be right wing enough to satisfy some Republicans.
Kavanaugh may not be conservative enough to survive the confirmation process. There is even talk that conservatives might revolt against Kavanaugh, as they did in 2005 against George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers. The reason? Many conservatives wanted Kavanaugh to cast doubt on the teenager’s right to get an abortion at all, which another dissenting judge did.
Neal K. Katyal for respondents, Travel Ban case
Legally speaking, that objection is absurd. Not unlike “judicial minimalist” Chief Justice John Roberts, Kavanaugh was discussing the case at issue, not some hypothetical issue. And he was responding to the circuit court’s holding, not writing an essay.
But there’s more. Some conservatives have pointed to dicta in another Kavanaugh opinion, a dissent in Priests for Life v. HHS, a case similar to Hobby Lobby involving the Affordable Care Act’s contraception requirement. While dissenting in favor of the Catholic religious organization objecting to the requirement, Kavanaugh wrote that the “the Government has a compelling interest in facilitating women’s access to contraception” because of a variety of factors, such as “reducing the number of unintended pregnancies would further women’s health, advance women’s personal and professional opportunities, reduce the number of abortions, and help break a cycle of poverty.”
Kavanaugh is writing here about the state’s interest in access to contraception, not whether an individual has a constitutional right to access it. Those are totally different questions. But Kavanaugh’s opinion doesn’t question the constitutional right either, which rests on the same foundations (substantive due process, privacy, family) as the right to obtain an abortion.
This one is a must read–lots of details on Kavenaugh’s record. Head over to The Daily Beast to read the rest.
Read more about Kavenaugh and abortion here:
https://twitter.com/imillhiser/status/1016672606269952001
One more from The New York Times editorial board: There’s So Much You Don’t Know About Brett Kavanaugh. And you probably won’t until it’s too late.
First, the awful lot: Judge Kavanaugh would shift the balance of constitutional jurisprudence to the right, creating a solid right-wing majority on the court possibly until the second half of the 21st century. While the somewhat unpredictable Justice Anthony Kennedy once served as the fulcrum for the court, that role will now go to Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., a far more ideological conservative.
Judge Kavanaugh, who sits on the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia, has been a fixture in conservative politics and is widely respected by the Republican elite. Before becoming a judge, he clerked for Justice Kennedy and worked for Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton, and later in the George W. Bush White House. He successfully portrayed himself in his remarks at the White House as a nice guy who coaches girls in basketball, feeds the homeless and believes in the Constitution.
What Americans can’t know about Judge Kavanaugh: pretty much anything else. That’s thanks to the perversion of the Supreme Court confirmation process, which once provided the Senate and the public with useful information about a potential justice’s views on the Constitution, but which has, ever since the bitter battle over President Ronald Reagan’s failed nomination of Robert Bork in 1987, devolved into a second-rate Samuel Beckett play starring an earnest legal scholar who sits for days at a microphone and labors to sound thoughtful while saying almost nothing.
Read the rest at the NYT.
I know there’s plenty of other news, but this is the biggie for today. Post your thoughts and links on any topic in the comment thread, and try to have a good day despite the horrors all around us.
Saturday Reads: Surreality Is Our New Normal
Posted: July 7, 2018 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Foreign Affairs, U.S. Politics 12 Comments
Henri Matisse, The three sisters, 1916-17
Good Afternoon!!
First a bunch of Republicans spend the Fourth of July in Russia sucking up to Russian government leaders in order to “smooth the way” for the upcoming July 16 Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki; now Glenn Greenwald is over there defending Trump on RT. A couple of lowlights of the interview:
RT: Glenn, you are now in Russia. Going to Russia is seen in the West as almost treason now, even worse than during the times of the Soviet Union. Why do you think that is?
G.G: There is an obsession in the United States with viewing Russia not just as an adversary, but as an actual enemy. It’s permeated by both political parties. There is actual talk a lot now about how what they regards as the interference in the 2016 election is similar to Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese attacked the United States during World War II, or Al Qaeda and 9/11. And there is the sense that Russia is now an enemy on par with Al Qaeda or the Japanese during WWII.
Of course Glenn doesn’t believe Trump is involved in a conspiracy with Russia.
RT: Have the last two years of inquiries and reports convinced you that Trump colluded with Russia?
G.G: No, if anything, it’s convinced me that it’s more unlikely than ever. There are factions within the intelligence community of the United States, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI that hate Donald Trump and will do anything to destroy him, including leaking classified information against him. I believe that if there were evidence of collusion between Trump and the Russian government, when it comes to the hacking of the DNC or the John Podesta emails, we would have seen in by now. We have not seen it by now.
Monika Seidenbusch
Even people, who hate Donald Trump in the CIA, have tried to warn the Democrats: don’t expect there to be evidence of it; we don’t have evidence of it. But it’s like a religious belief to other people in the United States. And of course as we know religion doesn’t require evidence.
I don’t say it didn’t happen, because it could have happened. All I say is until there is evidence of it I don’t think we should believe it happened. And so far there is no evidence.
Glenn also sees little difference between Obama and Trump. You’d think as a gay man, he might be concerned about Trump’s hateful policies, but then Glenn doesn’t live in the U.S., so he probably doesn’t care what happens to our LGBT community. Read the rest at RT.
Just how much time has Trump spent talking to Putin? According to The Washington Post, he has given out his personal cell phone number to “a handful” of foreign leaders. Is Putin one of them? Are Trump and Putin talking during Trump’s “executive time” or when he snuggled under the covers in his private bedroom?
Some White House officials worry that Putin, who has held several calls with Trump, plays on the president’s inexperience and lack of detailed knowledge about issues while stoking Trump’s grievances.
The Russian president complains to Trump about “fake news” and laments that the U.S. foreign policy establishment — the “deep state,” in Putin’s words — is conspiring against them, the first senior U.S. official said.
“It’s not us,” Putin has told Trump, the official summarized. “It’s the subordinates fighting against our friendship.”
In conversations with Trudeau, May and Merkel, Trump is sometimes assertive, brash and even bullying on issues he feels strongly about, such as trade, according to senior U.S. officials. He drives the conversation and isn’t shy about cutting off the allies mid-sentence to make his point, the officials said.
David Hettinger
With Putin, Trump takes a more conciliatory approach, often treating the Russian leader as a confidant.
“So what do you think I should do about North Korea?” he asked Putin in their November 2017 telephone call, according to U.S. officials. Some of those officials saw the request for advice as naive — a sign that Trump believes the two countries are partners in the effort to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. Other officials described Trump’s query as a savvy effort to flatter and win over the Russian leader, whose country borders North Korea and has long been involved in diplomacy over its nuclear program.
Click on the link above to read the whole scary article.
Secretary of State Mike Pomeo has been over in North Korea trying to clean up the mess Trump made at his summit with Kim Jong Un.
The Washington Post: North Korea calls U.S. attitude toward talks ‘regrettable,’ rejecting Pompeo’s claim meetings were ‘productive.’
Just hours after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo departed North Korea after two days of nuclear negotiations, North Korea sharply criticized the U.S. team’s attitude as “regrettable,” and accused the U.S. of making unilateral demands of denuclearization.
The remarks from North Korea’s foreign ministry directly contradicted statements made by Pompeo that the visit made “progress on almost all of the central issues” and involved “good-faith negotiations.”
The Foreign Ministry statement, issued by an unnamed spokesman, said the U.S. violated the spirit of the June 12 Singapore summit between President Trump and Kim Jong Un.
Daniel Gerhartz
The mixed messages followed a visit in which Pompeo did not meet with the North Korean leader while in the country and did not secure a breakthrough in forging a shared understanding of denuclearization.
Pompeo has come under increasing pressure to produce tangible results from the summit that President Trump quickly touted as a game-changing moment that eliminated North Korea’s nuclear threat.
But analysts said the reality is now sinking in that any final accord between the two nations to eliminate Pyongyang’s sophisticated nuclear and missile arsenal will be a long slog with no guarantee of success.
Gee, no kidding. Who could have predicted that?
The horror stories of immigrant children separated from their parents are coming thick and fast now. Dakinikat posted this PBS link yesterday, but I’m posting it again for anyone who missed it. It consists of
“powerful personal testimonies from parents, children and other family members who were directly impacted by the Trump policy. It also included declarations from the state attorneys general offices, elected representatives, advocates and child and immigration experts who have dealt with families separated at the border.”
Two new stories:
Reveal: Defense contractor detained migrant kids in vacant Phoenix office building.
A major U.S. defense contractor quietly detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with dark windows, no kitchen and only a few toilets during three weeks of the Trump administration’s family separation effort, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has learned.
Videos shot by an alarmed neighbor show children dressed in sweatsuits being led – one so young she was carried – into the 3,200-square-foot building in early June. The building is not licensed by Arizona to hold children, and the contractor, MVM Inc., has claimed publicly that it does not operate “shelters or any other type of housing” for children.
Defending the administration’s policy to separate families at the border in a May interview with NPR, White House chief of staff John Kelly promised: “The children will be taken care of – put into foster care or whatever.”
Carol Marine
Whether or not these children were taken from their parents, that “whatever” for them was the vacant building tucked away in a midtown Phoenix neighborhood. It is not listed among shelters operating through the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement or on the state child care licensing website.
There are new cameras on the building, extra locks on the doors and a paper shredder bin directly outside the building’s side door. Neighbor Lianna Dunlap’s videos show workers pulling up in white vans and leading dazed children into the building. When she asked questions, she said the workers responded with silence or terse answers.
“There’s been times where I drive by and I just start crying because, you know, it’s right behind my house,” said Dunlap, her voice wavering. “I don’t know and I think that’s the worst part – not knowing what’s actually going on in there and just hoping that they’re OK.”
It’s horrifying, but please read the whole thing.
The Texas Tribune: The Trump administration is not keeping its promises to asylum seekers who come to ports of entry.
In the weeks since President Donald Trump’s now-rescinded family separation policy created chaos and confusion across the country, the messages from his administration and prominent Republican members of Congress have been clear: Seek asylum legally at official ports of entry and you won’t lose your kids. There may be armed Customs and Border Protection agents standing at the halfway points of bridges — but simply wait a few days, declare to them that you are seeking asylum, and you’ll get a fair shake.
A recent Department of Homeland Security news release says it’s a “myth” that the agency “separates families who entered at the ports of entry and who are seeking asylum – even though they have not broken the law.” The release also says the agency “is [not] turning away asylum seekers at ports of entry.”
Reading by the Oven (1961). Oksana Dmitrievna..
But there’s ample evidence to suggest otherwise. Court records and individual cases discovered by The Texas Tribune indicate that a number of asylum seekers who came to international bridges in Texas and California were separated from their children anyway — or were not able to cross the bridge at all after encountering armed Customs and Border Protection agents on the bridge. And experts argue there’s no basis to the government’s claim that there aren’t enough resources to process asylum seekers.
On top of that, experts say a quirk of U.S. immigration law might actually put people who try to seek asylum at the official ports of entry at a disadvantage to those who cross the border in other ways — such as wading across the Rio Grande. That’s because unlike people who cross the border illegally, asylum seekers who come to ports of entry are not eligible to be bonded out of immigration detention by a judge; instead, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have total discretion over whether they can be released.
Read the rest at the Texas Tribune.
One more from Huffington Post: Friday’s Hearing Gave Us a Glimpse of How Many Kids Might Be Orphaned by Family Separation. The article calls attention to the possibility that a number of separated kids may never be reunited with their parents.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the hearing on Friday was the number of parents who the government has been unable to find after taking their very young children.
The Department of Justice attorney, Sarah Fabian, said the government had identified 101 children younger than 5 who might fall within the judge’s order. Two parents of those children, the government argues, have criminal records that render them unfit to be reunited with their children. Fabian said 19 parents had been released from custody into the United States and 19 had been deported. The government does not know where at least some of these parents are.
The Courthouse News Service reported that there are “86 parents who have been in contact with 83 children under 5 who are in federal custody.” These numbers indicate that roughly 16 children have not had contact with their parents, who may be missing following deportations or release into the United States.
This raises the terrifying possibility that 16 children younger than 5 may never see their parents again because of Trump’s unconstitutional child separation practices. The ACLU has promised to do everything it can to ensure that doesn’t happen, but that outcome will depend greatly on how adept the administration is at undoing some of the damage it has already done.
On that awful note, I need to wind this up. Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread below.
Thursday Reads: Weird But True News
Posted: July 5, 2018 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics 25 Comments
Good Morning!!
I’m feeling really disoriented this morning. I’ve been away from my apartment all week; I’m house-sitting at my brother’s place. I tend to feel this way during holiday weekends when the usual pace of news coverage slows down–even when I’m in my own space. This time the holiday was in the middle of the week; so it feels to me like a week-long holiday weekend, if that makes any sense. Between being away from home and the holiday and dealing with the ongoing strangeness of Trump as “president,” I’m feeling strangely detached from reality.
What news coverage there has been this week has been weird. The New York Times and The Boston Globe have frontpaged stories about Alan Dershowitz being “shunned” by his old friends on Martha’s Vineyard, while ignoring the story about the report issues by the Senate Intelligence Committee stating that Vladimir Putin personally ordered Russian interference in the 2016 election to help Trump.
Vox: Trump: Russia didn’t interfere in the election. GOP-led Senate panel: Yeah, it did.
A GOP-led Senate panel concluded on Tuesday that the US intelligence community’s 18-month-old conclusions about the 2016 presidential election — that Moscow meddled to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump— were “well supported.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee released a seven-page summary that corroborates much of what the CIA, NSA, and FBI concluded back in January 2017, and praises their report as “a sound intelligence product” — despite President Donald Trump’s continued insistence that Russia didn’t interfere to help him and his criticism of the intelligence assessment as biased against him.
“The Committee has spent the last 16 months reviewing the sources, tradecraft and analytic work underpinning the Intelligence Community Assessment and sees no reason to dispute the conclusions,” Intelligence Committee Chair Richard Burr (R-NC) said in a statement.
The report does point out that the CIA and FBI had “high confidence” that Russia was trying to help Trump win, but that the NSA only had “moderate confidence” of that finding. However, the committee writes that they found “the analytical disagreement” between the agencies “was reasonable, transparent, and openly debated” — not the result of political bias.
Read the full report at the Vox link.
There also has been limited coverage of a delegation of Republicans who chose to spend the Fourth of July in Moscow having secret meetings with Russian officials. Why the secrecy? Are they discussing how to fix the upcoming midterm elections?
The Washington Post: Republican lawmakers come to Moscow, raising hopes there of U.S.-Russia thaw.
Republican members of Congress sounded a newly conciliatory tone in meetings with Russian lawmakers and officials here on Tuesday in a rare visit to Moscow and a preview of the looming summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) told Russia’s foreign minister that while Russia and the United States were competitors, “we don’t necessarily need to be adversaries.” Later on at the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, members attending a plenary session greeted the Americans with applause.
“I’m not here today to accuse Russia of this or that or so forth,” Shelby told Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. “I’m saying that we should all strive for a better relationship.” [….]
Among the Russians meeting with the Republicans on Tuesday was Sergey Kislyak — the former Russian ambassador to Washington whose communications with Michael Flynn led to the former national security adviser’s downfall. Kislyak, now a member of the upper house of parliament, noted in an interview after the meeting that many of the Republicans sitting across the table were already known to him from Washington.
So a group consisting of Republicans only is working on this “thaw?” In secret? This stinks to high heaven. Apparently, the group had also hoped to meet with Putin. From Twitter:
Most of the lawmakers tweeted July 4th as if they were here in the U.S., probably hoping their constituents wouldn’t know where they were. But Twitter was ready for them. Read the responses to this tweet from Dakinikat’s Senator.
As these GOP dupes spend their holiday sucking up to Russia, the UK is dealing with more poisonings by that Russian nerve agent. Yahoo News:
Salisbury (United Kingdom) (AFP) – Britain demanded answers from Russia Thursday after a couple was exposed to the same nerve agent used on a former Russian spy and his daughter in an attempted murder blamed on Moscow.
But Russia quickly hit back, denouncing Britain for playing “dirty political games” and demanding London apologise.
The British couple fell ill on Saturday in Amesbury, a small town near the southwestern English city of Salisbury where former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia collapsed on March 4….
Speaking to parliament on Thursday, Interior Minister Sajid Javid said a link between the cases was “clearly the main line of inquiry” and demanded Moscow explain itself.
Remember when the UK was our ally? A normal U.S. president would support Britain’s efforts to get answers from Russia. Instead, we have a president who adores Putin and other brutal dictators and Republican Congresspeople who bow down to Moscow.
As Trump continues to get rid of the people who were once thought of as “adults” on his staff, we are likely to be dealing with more crazy stories like this one from AP: Trump pressed aides on Venezuela invasion, US official says.
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — As a meeting last August in the Oval Office to discuss sanctions on Venezuela was concluding, President Donald Trump turned to his top aides and asked an unsettling question: With a fast unraveling Venezuela threatening regional security, why can’t the U.S. just simply invade the troubled country?
The suggestion stunned those present at the meeting, including U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, both of whom have since left the administration. This account of the previously undisclosed conversation comes from a senior administration official familiar with what was said.
In an exchange that lasted around five minutes, McMaster and others took turns explaining to Trump how military action could backfire and risk losing hard-won support among Latin American governments to punish President Nicolas Maduro for taking Venezuela down the path of dictatorship, according to the official. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the discussions.
But Trump pushed back. Although he gave no indication he was about to order up military plans, he pointed to what he considered past cases of successful gunboat diplomacy in the region, according to the official, like the invasions of Panama and Grenada in the 1980s.
The idea, despite his aides’ best attempts to shoot it down, would nonetheless persist in the president’s head.
Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro speaks during his meeting with Palestinian President Maduro (REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins)
The next day, Aug. 11, Trump alarmed friends and foes alike with talk of a “military option” to remove Maduro from power. The public remarks were initially dismissed in U.S. policy circles as the sort of martial bluster people have come to expect from the reality TV star turned commander in chief.
But shortly afterward, he raised the issue with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, according to the U.S. official. Two high-ranking Colombian officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing Trump confirmed the report.
Then in September, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Trump discussed it again, this time at greater length, in a private dinner with leaders from four Latin American allies that included Santos, the same three people said and Politico reported in February.
The U.S. official said Trump was specifically briefed not to raise the issue and told it wouldn’t play well, but the first thing the president said at the dinner was, “My staff told me not to say this.” Trump then went around asking each leader if they were sure they didn’t want a military solution, according to the official, who added that each leader told Trump in clear terms they were sure.
There is a literal lunatic in charge of our government and no one in power is doing much of anything about it.
I’ll end this strange post with yesterday’s Statue of Liberty story.
A woman who climbed up to the robes of the Statue of Liberty to protest the separation of migrant families was taken into custody after a standoff with police on the Fourth of July.
Authorities had tried to talk the woman down but she refused to leave. For nearly three hours, she crossed the base of the statue, at times sitting in the folds of the statue’s dress and under Lady Liberty’s sandal. The woman was identified as Therese Patricia Okoumou by a law enforcement source close to the investigation and another source who knows her.
The woman was part of a group of protesters and had declared that she wouldn’t come down until “all the children are released,” a source with the New York Police Department told CNN.
The New York Daily News: Who is Therese Patricia Okoumou, the woman who tried to scale the Statue of Liberty to protest immigration policy?
The woman arrested for scaling the base of the Statue of Liberty on Wednesday as part of a protest against U.S. immigration policy is an immigrant herself and an active participant in the resistance movement against President Trump, according to fellow demonstrators.
Therese Patricia Okoumou, 44, of Staten Island, was born and educated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but she has lived in New York for at least the last 10 years, records show.
She joined the group Rise and Resist, which unfurled an “Abolish ICE” banner at the base of the statue on Wednesday, a few months ago and has been taking part in about one protest a week with the group, according to member Jay Walker….
Public records show that Okoumou has a long history of fighting social justice battles, even her own.
In 2003, she filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit, charging racial discrimination after being fired from a job as a staffer at a battered women’s home called Safe Horizons. Okoumou’s boss complained that she was rude to other staffers and clients at the shelter, according to court records. Her lawyer eventually withdrew from the case and she represented herself, unsuccessfully for the remainder of the case.
She won $1,500 in a 2009 racial discrimination lawsuit against a Staten Island towing company, County Recovery.
She unsuccessfully filed a human rights complaint in 2007 against a group home in Staten Island for racial discrimination.
Read more at the Daily News link.
So . . . what stories are you following today? Or are you ignoring the news?
Tuesday Reads
Posted: July 3, 2018 Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics 34 CommentsGood Morning!!
When I first started looking at the news this morning, this story from The Baltimore Sun was all over Twitter: Trump declines request to lower flags in memory of Capital Gazette shooting victims.
Victims of the Capital Gazette Shooting: Gerald Fischman, Robert Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters.
President Donald Trump has declined a request from Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley to lower American flags in honor of the fatal shooting of five employees of The Capital newspaper last week.
“Obviously, I’m disappointed, you know? … Is there a cutoff for tragedy?” Buckley said Monday afternoon. “This was an attack on the press. It was an attack on freedom of speech. It’s just as important as any other tragedy.”
Gov. Larry Hogan ordered Maryland state flags to be lowered to half-staff from Friday through sunset on Monday.
Through Maryland’s congressional delegation, Buckley put in a request to the White House over the weekend to lower the American flags.
Buckley had said he hoped having the American flags lowered, too, would help keep national attention on the attack.
Trump has ordered flags lowered for previous mass shootings, including in May after the deaths of 10 people at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, and the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February that left 17 dead.
Apparently, public outrage sometimes works with the Trumpers because now the story includes this update at the top:
The White House has reversed its decision and will allow American flags to be flown at half-staff in honor of five victims of the shooting at The Capital newspaper last week.
Maybe some White House staffer managed to get it through Trump’s thick head that the public his anti-press temper tantrums would not look so good in the context of actual reporters being murdered. In any case, good to know that public shaming is working on someone in the White House. Let’s redouble our efforts to shame them unmercifully!
Another judge has interfered with Trump’s cruel immigration policies. Politico: Judge’s order could undercut Trump’s immigrant detention plan.
Judge James Boasberg
An order a federal judge issued Monday requiring individualized decisions on whether some asylum-seekers can be released into the U.S. poses a new legal threat to President Donald Trump’s effort to crack down on migrants crossing the border from Mexico.
U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg said there is strong evidence that five offices of the Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement were ignoring a 2009 agency directive requiring case-by-case determinations on whether asylum seekers who passed the initial “credible fear” screening could be released pending an immigration judge’s decision on their claim.
Boasberg said lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union justified the injunction by showing that releases of such immigrants by some offices dropped dramatically after Trump took office last year. Between February and September of last year, 100 percent of parole applications at three ICE offices were denied, the judge said, while two other offices released eight percent or fewer of those requesting release.
“The record indicates that, instead, they are subject to a de facto ‘no-parole’ reality, under which detention has become the default option,” wrote Boasberg, an appointee of President Barack Obama.
Future determinations “shall not be based on categorical criteria,” the judge added in an order. He suggested a policy targeting those who made “recent entry” to the U.S. would be deemed categorical and contrary to the state policy.
The ruling applies only to people who come through an official port of entry and immediately request asylum and it only applies to five ICE field offices: Detroit, El Paso, Los Angeles, Newark and Philadelphia. Still, it seems the courts are our best hope to have an effect on Trump’s awful immigration policies.
If you watched Rachel Maddow last night, you heard that the Trump administration is so far making zero effort to reunite families as ordered by a California judge last week. You can watch the interview with immigration lawyer Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch at this link if you missed it.
As Paul Krugman suggests, Trump is “governing” by temper tantrum. Whoever or whatever he doesn’t like becomes the target of his wrath, and the policies are unencumbered by any reality testing. He just wants what he wants when he wants it, and he’ll just lie about whether the policies accomplish his goals. Here’s Krugman on Trump’s trade wars: Temper Tantrum to Trade War.
In one way, Donald Trump’s attack on our foreign trade partners resembles his attack on immigrants: in each case, the attack is framed as a response to evildoing that exists only in his imagination. No, there isn’t a wave of violent crime by immigrants, and MS-13 isn’t taking over American towns; no, the European Union doesn’t have “horrific” tariffs on U.S. products (the average tariff is only 3 percent).
In another way, however, the trade crisis is quite different from the humanitarian crisis at the border. Children ripped from their parents and put in cages can’t retaliate. Furious foreign governments, many of them U.S. allies that feel betrayed, can and will.
But all indications are that Trump and his advisers still don’t get it. They remain blithely ignorant about what they’re getting into.
Back in March, as the U.S. was imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports — and yes, justifying its actions against Canada (!) on the grounds of national security — Peter Navarro, the White House trade czar, was asked about possible retaliation. “I don’t believe any country will retaliate,” he declared, basing his claim on the supposed upper hand America has because we import more than we export.
Krugman points out that both our allies and enemies are retaliating and the situation could very easily get out of hand.
…both the scale and the motivation behind the Trump tariffs — their obviously fraudulent national security rationale — are something new. They amount to rejecting the rules of the game we created; the E.U., in its warning, bluntly calls U.S. actions “disregard for international law.” Sure enough, Axios reports that the Trump administration has drafted legislation that would effectively take us out of the W.T.O.
The U.S. is now behaving in ways that could all too easily lead to a breakdown of the whole trading system and a drastic, disruptive reduction in world trade.
There are some new Russia investigation stories in the news this morning. This one from Emptywheel is particularly interesting and scary too: Putting a Face (Mine) to the Risks Posed by GOP Games on Mueller Investigation. Marcy describes how she came to report a person to the FBI.
I never in my life imagined I would share information with the FBI, especially not on someone I had a journalistic relationship with. I did so for many reasons. Some, but not all, of the reasons are:
- I believed he was doing serious harm to innocent people
- I believed (others agreed) that reporting the story at that time would risk doing far more harm than good
- I had concrete evidence he was lying to me and others, including but not limited to other journalists
- I had reason to believe he was testing ways to tamper with my website
- I believed that if the FBI otherwise came to understand what kind of information I had, their likely investigative steps would pose a risk to the privacy of my readers
To protect the investigation, I will not disclose this person’s true identity or the identity and/or role I believe he played in the attack. Nor will I disclose when I went to the FBI. I did so on my own, without subpoena; I did that in an effort to protect people who have spoken to me in confidence and other journalists. Largely because this effort involved a number of last minute trips to other cities, I spent around $6K of my own money traveling to meet with lawyers and for the meeting with the FBI.
John Darkow / Columbia Daily Tribune
You’ll need to read the entire post, but the gist is that Marcy was contacted by someone who had information about a meeting between Michael Flynn and and someone associated with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. This seemed to link up with reports that Jared Kushner wanted to open a back channel for communication with Russia about Syria policy. She also links to a new article by David Ignatius at The Washington Post, which I’ll get to in a minute. But the gist of her post is that House Republicans are putting people like Marcy who gave information to the FBI in danger.
The other reason I’m disclosing this now is to put a human face to the danger in which the House Republicans are putting other people who, like me, provided information about the Russian attack on the US to the government.
Several times since I first considered sharing information with the FBI, I’ve asked my attorney to contact the FBI to tell them of what I perceived to be a real threat that arose from sharing that information. One of those times, I let law enforcement officers enter my house without a warrant, without me being present.
My risk isn’t going to go away — indeed, going public like this will surely exacerbate it. That’s to be expected, given the players involved.
But I’m a public figure. If something happens to me — if someone releases stolen information about me or knocks me off tomorrow — everyone will now know why and who likely did it. That affords me a small bit of protection. There are undoubtedly numerous other witnesses who have taken similar risks to share information with the government who aren’t public figures. The Republicans’ ceaseless effort to find out more details about people who’ve shared information with the government puts those people in serious jeopardy.
I’m speaking out because they can’t — and shouldn’t have to.
Please do go read the rest at Emptywheel.
Now for the story by David Ignatius: Is Trump handing Putin a victory in Syria?
The catastrophic war in Syria is nearing what could be a diplomatic endgame, as the United States , Russia and Israel shape a deal that would preserve power for Syrian President Bashar al -Assad in exchange for Russian pledges to restrain Iranian influence.
Checking Iranian power has become the only major Trump administration goal in Syria, now that the Islamic State is nearly vanquished. President Trump appears ready to embrace a policy that will validate Assad, an authoritarian leader who has gassed his own people, and abandon a Syrian opposition that was partly trained and supplied by the United States….
The diplomatic discussions about Syria come as Trump prepares for a July 16 summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Foreign diplomats and administration officials are unsure just what will be on the agenda, but the Syria package will probably be in play.
An intriguing aspect of the possible Syria deal is that it’s driven by close cooperation between Russia and Israel. The Israeli agenda, like Trump’s, is narrowly focused on blocking Iran — and Israelis seem to have concluded that Putin is a reliable regional partner.
Read the details of the prospective deal at the WaPo link above.
More Russia stories to check out, links only:
AP: Russian charged with Trump’s ex-campaign chief is key figure.
Buzzfeed News: The Senate Intel Committee Is In Regular Contact With The Trump–Russia Dossier Author.
Adam Davidson at The New Yorker: Is Michael Cohen Turning on Donald Trump?
Emily Jane Fox at Vanity Fair: “He Was Trying to Get Ahead of Things”: Michael Cohen, Former Trump Shield and Current Regency Prisoner, Got Sick of Being a Whipping Boy.
That’s it for me. What stories are you following today?
Lazy Saturday Reads: Families Belong Together
Posted: June 30, 2018 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics 12 Comments
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.
https://twitter.com/No1RealWolfy/status/1012879599150206976
https://twitter.com/No1RealWolfy/status/1012902123099566080
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.
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