⚖️🛡⚔️ROUND TABLE AMICUS BRIEF IN SUPREMES’ SANTOS-ZACARIA V. GARLAND (EXHAUSTION BEFORE EOIR) GETS “PLAY” ON “STRICT SCRUTINY PODCAST” WITH PROFESSORS LEAH LITMAN (MICHIGAN LAW) & KATE SHAW (CARDOZO LAW)!

Professor Kate ShawCardozo Law PHOTO: Cardozo Law Website
Professor Kate Shaw
Cardozo Law
PHOTO: Cardozo Law Website
Professor Leah Litman
Professor Leah Litman
University of Michigan Law
PHOTO: Michigan Law Website

Kate and Leah were live from the University of Pennsylvania in Strict Scrutiny’s first live show of 2023! Penn Law Professor Jasmine E. Harris joined the hosts to recap arguments in a case that could impact disability rights. Kate and Leah recap two other arguments, in a case about immigration law and another about the ability to criminally prosecute corporations owned by foreign states. Plus, a major update about the Supreme Court’s “investigation” into who leaked the draft opinion of Dobbs last spring. And Temple University Law School Dean Rachel Rebouche joined the hosts to talk about some concerning updates in abortion access– an unfortunately commemoration of the 50th  anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
• Here’s the report summarizing the Supreme Court’s investigation into who leaked the Dobbs opinion. (TLDR: they still don’t know who did it, but they tried their best? Former United States Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said so.)

To hear the comments on our amicus brief “tune in” at 14:00 (lots of other “interesting commentary” on other cases if you listen to the entire program):

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/strict-scrutiny/id1469168641?i=1000596018641

Here’s a copy of our amicus brief drafted by our pro bono heroes at Perkins Coie LLC:

Round Table Amicus Santos Zacaria v. Garland

********************************

“With the highest possible human stakes,” amen, Kate! I get that, you get that, those stuck in the “purgatory of EOIR” get that! But, sadly, Biden, Harris, Garland, Mayorkas, their too often bumbling bureaucrats, and a whole bunch of Federal Judges at all levels DON’T “get” the dire human consequences and the practical impact of many of their decisions. That’s particularly true of those that give EOIR a “pass” on bad interpretations, opaque procedures, and a “super-user-unfriendly” forum that all too often defies logic and common sense!  If they did “get it,” EOIR wouldn’t be the dystopian, likely unconstitutional, and life-threatening mess that it is today!

All you have to do is imagine yourself to be an unrepresented individual, who doesn’t speak English, on trial for your life in this messed up and unaccountable “court” system that holds millions of lives in its fumbling hands! Seems like a “modest ask” for those who have risen to the Federal Bench. But, for many, it’s a “bridge too far!” Let’s just hope that the Court does the “right thing” here!

Thanks to Round Table Maven Judge “Sir Jeffrey” Chase for spotting this!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-26-22

👹🎃HALLOWEEN HORROR 🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎🏻REICHSREPORT: GRUPPENFUHRER MILLER REVEALS “REICHSPLAN” FOR EXTERMINATION OF IMMIGRATION, ASYLUM, REFUGE BY EXECUTIVE DECREE!  — “The Final Solution??”  — Parents, Protect Your Kids, Families, & Your Country From This Grotesque Un-American Monster!

Stephen Miller Monster
Attribution: Stephen Miller Monster by Peter Kuper, PoliticalCartoons.com

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-adviser-stephen-miller-reveals-aggressive-second-term-immigration-agenda-n1245407

Sahil Kapur reports for NBC News:

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump‘s senior adviser Stephen Miller has fleshed out plans to rev up Trump’s restrictive immigration agenda if he wins re-election next week, offering a stark contrast to the platform of Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

In a 30-minute phone interview Thursday with NBC News, Miller outlined four major priorities: limiting asylum grants, punishing and outlawing so-called sanctuary cities, expanding the so-called travel ban with tougher screening for visa applicants and slapping new limits on work visas.

The objective, he said, is “raising and enhancing the standard for entry” to the United States.

Some of the plans would require legislation. Others could be achieved through executive action, which the Trump administration has relied on heavily in the absence of a major immigration bill.

Examining Trump’s immigration campaign promises four years later

AUG. 25, 202005:51Some of the plans would require legislation. Others could be achieved through executive action, which the Trump administration has relied on heavily in the absence of a major immigration bill.

“In many cases, fixing these problems and restoring some semblance of sanity to our immigration programs does involve regulatory reform,” Miller said. “Congress has delegated a lot of authority. … And that underscores the depth of the choice facing the American people.”

Miller, who serves in a dual role as an adviser in the White House and to Trump’s re-election campaign, stressed that he was speaking about second-term priorities only in his capacity as campaign adviser.

Immigration has been overshadowed by surging coronavirus case numbers and an economy shattered by a nearly yearlong pandemic, but it was central to Trump’s rise to power in the Republican Party, and Miller has been a driving force for the administration’s often controversial policies to crack down on illegal migration and erect hurdles for aspiring legal immigrants.

Miller has spearheaded an immigration policy that critics describe as cruel, racist and antithetical to American values as a nation of immigrants. He scoffs at those claims, insisting that his only priority is to protect the safety and wages of Americans.

And he said he intends to stay on to see the agenda through in a second term if Trump is re-elected.

In the near term, Miller wouldn’t commit to lifting the freeze on new green cards and visas that’s set to expire at the end of the year, saying it would be “entirely contingent” on governmental analysis that factors in the state of the job market.

Asked whether he would support reinstating the controversial “zero tolerance” policy that led to families’ being separated, Miller said the Trump administration is “100 percent committed to a policy of family unity,” but he described the policy as one that would keep families together in immigration detention by changing what is known as the Flores settlement agreement.

Over the past year, the administration has sought to amend the Flores agreement, which says children can’t be held over 20 days in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention. If it succeeds, immigrant families could be detained indefinitely as they await their day in immigration court.

Keep asylum down

On Trump’s watch, asylum grants have plummeted. Miller wants to keep it that way. He said a second-term Trump administration would seek to expand “burden-sharing” deals with Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador that cut off pathways to the U.S. for asylum-seekers.

“The president would like to expand that to include the rest of the world,” Miller said. “And so if you create safe third partners in other continents and other countries and regions, then you have the ability to share the burden of asylum-seekers on a global basis.”

. . . .

***************

Read the complete report at the link.

Kids in cages, refugees returned to torture and death, ethnic communities terrorized, lives destroyed, an economy and a society (make no mistake about it, immigrants will be essential to America’s recovery, future prosperity, and competitiveness) in tatters, tens of millions wasted on unnecessary and counterproductive Gulags, walls, and cruel enforcement while the Gruppenfuherer and his fellow human rights criminals remain at large and and an existential threat to our nation and our world!

To state the obvious, this has little or nothing to do with protecting American workers. Trump has shown that he couldn’t care less about the health, safety, and welfare of American workers (or frankly anybody except himself) except at election time. Immigration and immigrants create jobs and economic prosperity for America.

Also, even Miller couldn’t possibly believe that the Democratic House will pass any part of this racist manifesto. Truth is, Trump failed to pass any meaningful immigration legislation in four years, even when the GOP controlled all the political branches! In fact, Miller’s nativist legislative game-plan “poisoned the well” and was soundly defeated in both Houses of Congress! So, he intends to use Executive misrule, bureaucratic corruption, and a fascism-enabling, racially tone-deaf GOP Supremes’ majority to rule without Congress (as has been the case for the last four years.)

But make no mistake: the real “Reichsplan” here is directed at further institutionalizing racism, spreading hate, and targeting Americans of color. That’s what the regime’s “Dred Scottification” is really about. Reducing or eliminating YOUR Constitutional rights! Immigrants are the “usual suspects.” But, by no means will they be the only victims of Gruppenfuhrer Miller’s White Nationalist, racist, hate extravaganza.

As reported at the link above, The Biden-Harris campaign immediately and forcefully condemned the Gruppenfuhrer’s plans for “ethnic cleansing:”

“We are going to win this election so that people like Stephen Miller don’t get the chance to write more xenophobic policies that dishonor our American values,” Molina said. “Unlike Trump, Vice President Biden knows that immigrants make America stronger and helped build this country.”

America is immigration! It’s our past, present, and future! When we deny those truths, we deny ourselves and betray our own humanity!

Get out the vote for Joe, Kamala, and the Dems! Top to bottom of the ballot! Our lives and the future of American Democracy depend on it! Don’t let Gruppenfuhrer Miller and his neo-Nazi agenda, the GOP’s dark vision of the future, destroy our democracy! Vote the party of corruption, hate, and neo-fascism out!

Don’t let the Monster win!👹

Due Process Forever!

PWS

10-30-20

KAKISTOCRACY KORNER🤮👎: “WOLFMAN THE ILLEGAL” CALLED OUT AGAIN – U.S. Judge Stuffs USCIS’s Outrageously Unjustified Fee Increases – Wolfie’s “Illegality” Key To Victory For Good Guys! — ImmigrationProf Blog Reports!

Trump Regime Emoji
Trump Regime, Thieves Thrive on the Public Dole!

 

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Immigration fee hikes blocked by federal court

By Immigration Prof

 Share

Days before they were to go into effect, a federal court in the Northern District of California issued a national injunction blocking a dramatic fee hike for appliations for naturalized citizenship, permanent residency, asylum, and access to other immigration benefits. The new fees would have made immigration benefits unattainable for many. It would have nearly doubled citizenship from $640 to $1,170; increased lawful permanent residency and related application fees from $1,125 to $2,270; and added a $50 fee for asylum applications (the first time a fee has been assessed for asylum applications). The rule would have also eliminated most fee waivers for immigrants who cannot afford to pay the fees.

 

Judge Jeffrey White ruled that the nonprofit organizations that had challenged the fee increases would be likely to prevail in showing that Wolf’s appointment as Acting Director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, without Senate confirmation, violated the rules of succession. As a result, the fees ordered under his stewardship cannot take effect while the litigation progresses. Similar reasoning had been used in a separate lawsuit regarding Ken Cucinelli and his asylum directives.

 

MHC

 

*******************************

MHC = Professor Ming Hsu Chen one of the all-star ⭐️ team of bloggers at ImmigrationProf Blog. Thanks, Professor, for this timely item! These illegal and clearly punitive fee increases were scheduled to into effect at the beginning of October!

Ming Hsu Chen
Ming Hsu Chen
Associate Professor of Law
Colorado Law
Courtesy Appointment in Political Science
Ethnic Studies Faculty Affiliate
Faculty-Director, Immigration and Citizenship Law Program
Photo: ImmmigrationProf/
Col. Law

This is also a great illustration of why, totally contrary to the nonsense GOP party line and folks like GOP-owned Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, the nationwide injunction is an essential tool for achieving justice. According to the GOP’s false dogma, plaintiffs, many pro se, or appearing with pro bono or “low bono” representation, should be required to win their cases before over 650 U.S. District Judges and in 12 Circuits to get effective relief from the Trump regime’s unrelenting war on our Constitution and the rule of law.

 

 

While Trump and his GOP toadies and sycophants spout BS platitudes about “law and order” the truth is simple: This is a party of arrogant, immoral “scofflaws” from top to bottom!

This Fall, vote like your life and our future as a nation depend on it! Because they do! Vote the GOP kakistocracy out at every level! Don’t let their dark & dishonest plans become YOUR future!☠️⚰️

PWS

09-30-20

🏴‍☠️🤮👎🏻BILLY THE BIGOT GOES “FULL MAFIA” ON YOUR NICKEL!   — “Don The Con’s” Idea Of Pro Bono Legal Services — YOU Pay For His Crimes! — By Pat Bagley @ Salt Lake Tribune

Bill Barr Consigliere Artist: Par Begley Salt Lake Tribune Reproduced under license, Large
Bill Barr Consigliere
Artist: Pat Bagley
Salt Lake Tribune
Reproduced under license

*******************

Says it all about Billy the Bigot. His “downward sprint to the finish” has rocketed him past “John the Con” Mitchell and Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions as the most corrupt AG in modern American history. 

That’s, of course, not to minimize or trivialize the crimes committed by either of the other contenders. I suspect we’ll still be unpacking the full extent of Gonzo’s “crimes against humanity” decades from now, as the uglier and uglier truth about this “21st Century Jim Crow” dribbles out a bit at a time

Gee, even the “Afternoon Neighborhood Dog Walking Club” — comprised of neither lawyers nor hard core liberals, can’t understand why Barr, this walking, talking ethics cesspool is 1) still in office; 2) not in jail; and 3) still licensed to practice the law. Here’s hoping that all three of these unfathomable mysteries are resolved favorably to the public interest in the near future! In the meantime, Billy serves as a stark reminder of what’s wrong with legal ethics and our justice system at present.

With all the hard-working, talented, pro bono lawyers out there working overtime to save lives and our democracy, it’s simply a national disgrace and a travesty that unqualified, corrupt, unethical creeps like Billy and Gonzo have been “rewarded” with the an office that is supposed to function as “The People’s Lawyer.”

The Don’s felons and fellow conspirators against America get free passes; meanwhile, Americans of color can’t catch a break from a system loaded against them. Go figure!

Due Process Forever! Billy the Bigot, Never!

PWS

09-12-20

🏴‍☠️☠️🤮⚰️👎KAKISTOCRACY KORNER: SPOTLIGHT ON AMERICA’S MOST DANGEROUS HATE GROUP: THE RNC!

 

Paul,

This past weekend, the Republican National Committee caved to white supremacist and other hate groups by adopting a resolution titled Refuting the Legitimacy of the Southern Poverty Law Center to Identify Hate Groups.

The focus of the resolution is that “the SPLC is a radical organization” that harms conservative organizations and voices through our hate group designations.

This attack on our work is an attempt to excuse the Trump administration’s pattern and practice of working with individuals and organizations that malign entire groups of people — immigrants, Muslims and the LGBTQ community — while promoting policies that undermine their very existence. It comes from the same vein as Trump’s claim that there were “very fine people” on both sides of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Simply put, it’s an audacious attempt by Trump and the GOP to paper over the bigotry and racism that has been allowed to infect their policies.

This resolution comes at a moment when Trump will argue at the Republican National Convention that he will combat hate and bigotry, despite welcoming the support of QAnon. It also comes days after the indictment of Stephen Bannon, reminding us that Bannon was once the White House chief strategist and senior counselor and CEO of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. And it comes just after our special investigation shined a light on One America News Network’s Jack Posobiec, a reporter at Trump’s favorite network who is aligned with white supremacy and has used his platform to further hate speech and propaganda.

Trump should sever these ties to hate groups and extremists instead of doubling down through this RNC resolution.

The Trump administration has filled its ranks and consulted with alumni and allies from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigrant hate group that has ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists. They include Julie KirchnerKris KobachJeff Sessions and, most notably, Stephen Miller.

The Trump administration has worked with hate groups like the Family Research Council (FRC) to roll back LGBTQ rights. FRC was designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group for decades of demonizing LGBTQ people and spreading harmful pseudoscience about them. Over the years, the organization has published books, reports and brochures that have linked being LGBTQ to pedophilia, claimed that LGBTQ people are dangerous to children and claimed that LGBTQ people are promiscuous and violent.

Anti-Muslim groups have also been welcomed into the administration, including the Center for Security Policy (CSP)Fred Fleitz, a longtime staffer, was appointed the executive secretary and chief of staff of the National Security Council. For decades, CSP has peddled absurd accusations that shadowy Muslim Brotherhood operatives have infiltrated all levels of government.

These extremists are seeking a license to continue spreading their bigotry and will do anything to undermine those — like the SPLC, which tracks and monitors hate groups — who expose their extremist views and oppose their attacks on communities. With this resolution, Trump and members of the GOP have shown the extent to which they will carry their water.

This past weekend, the RNC also released a resolution titled Resolution to Conserve History and Combat Prejudice – Christopher Columbus. It’s a remarkably transparent statement that hate and bigotry stem from Black Lives Matter protesters. The RNC and Trump did not denounce organizations that promote antisemitism, Islamophobia, neo-Nazis, anti-LGBTQ sentiment or racism. It only criticized the SPLC for challenging those groups.

Outraged? Here are two ways to take action today:

1.     Sign up for our next Power Hour Virtual Phone Bank on August 27. We’ll be calling likely unregistered voters of color in Georgia to share information on how they can register to vote.

2.    Listen and subscribe to our new podcast, Sounds Like Hate. Episode 2 is about the connections between extremists and the Trump administration.

Onward,

Margaret Huang
SPLC President & CEO

DONATE
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Southern Poverty Law Center
400 Washington Avenue
Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright 2020

 

***************************************

Pretty much says it all about today’s GOP and the Trump Administration.

·      No platform

·      No values

·      No truth

·      No humanity

·      No decency

·      No America

·      No inclusion

·      The party of “Dred Scottification,” Jim Crow, and White Supremacy

Sure “Sounds Like Hate” to me!

This November, vote like your life and the future of our world depend on it! Because they do!

PWS

08-25-20

 

 

 

🛡⚔️⚖️ROUND TABLE RIPS REGIME’S FRAUDULENT PROPOSED REGS ELIMINATING ASYLUM IN 36-PAGE COMMENTARY — “The proposed rules are impermissibly arbitrary and capricious. They attempt to overcome, as opposed to interpret, the clear meaning of our asylum statutes.”

Knightess
Knightess of the Round Table

Asylum Ban Reg Comments_July 2020_FINAL

INTRODUCTION

In their introduction, the proposed regulations misstate the Congressional intent behind our asylum laws.2 Since 1980, our nation’s asylum laws are neither an expression of foreign policy nor an assertion of the right to protect resources or citizens. It is for this reason that the notice of proposed rulemaking must cite a case from 1972 that did not address asylum at all in order to find support for its claim.

The intent of Congress in enacting the 1980 Refugee Act was to bring our country’s asylum laws into accordance with our international treaty obligations, specifically by eliminating the above- stated biases from such determinations. For the past 40 years, our laws require us to grant asylum to all who qualify regardless of foreign policy or other concerns. Furthermore, the international treaties were intentionally left broad enough in their language to allow adjudicators flexibility to provide protection in response to whatever types of harm creative persecutors might de- vise. In choosing to adopt the precise language of those treaties, Congress adopted the same flexibility. See e.g. Murray v. The Schooner Charming Betsy, 6 U.S. 64 (1804), pursuant to which national statutes should be interpreted in such a way as to not conflict with international laws.

The proposed rules are impermissibly arbitrary and capricious. They attempt to overcome, as opposed to interpret, the clear meaning of our asylum statutes. Rather than interpret the views of Congress, the proposed rules seek to replace them in furtherance of the strongly anti-immigrant views of the administration they serve.3 And that they seek to do so in an election year, for political gain, is clear.

In attempting to stifle clear Congressional intent in service of its own political motives, the ad- ministration has proposed rules that are ultra vires to the statute.

*****************

Read our full comment at the above link.

Special thanks to the following Round Table Team that took the lead in drafting this comment (listed alphabetically):

Judge Jeffrey Chase

Judge Bruce Einhorn

Judge Rebecca Jamil

Judge Carol King

Judge Lory Diana Rosenberg

Judge Ilyce Shugall

Due Process Forever! Crimes Against Humanity, Never!

PWS

07-14-20

THE WORLD CHANNELS “COURTSIDE” — A Shocked & Dismayed World Now Sees America Under The Trump Clown 🤡🤡 Kakistocracy For What It Is: A Rich, Arrogant, Willfully Ignorant, Dishonest, Dangerous “Failing State” To Be Pitied — Not To Be Trusted, Followed, Or Admired — “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

 

Trump Clown
Donald J. Trump
Famous American Clown
Artist: Scott Scheidly
Orlando, FL

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/15/donald-trump-coronavirus-response-world-leaders?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

THE WORLD CHANNELS “COURTSIDE” — A Shocked & Dismayed World Now Sees America Under The Trump Clown 🤡🤡 Kakistocracy For What It Is: A Rich, Arrogant, Willfully Ignorant, Dishonest, Dangerous “Failing State” To Be Pitied — Not To Be Trusted, Followed, Or Admired — “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/15/donald-trump-coronavirus-response-world-leaders?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

From The Guardian:

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the US is “leading the world” with its response to the pandemic, but it does not seem to be going in any direction the world wants to follow.

Across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, views of the US handling of the coronavirus crisis are uniformly negative and range from horror through derision to sympathy. Donald Trump’s musings from the White House briefing room, particularly his thoughts on injecting disinfectant, have drawn the attention of the planet.

“Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”

The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life

The US has emerged as a global hotspot for the pandemic, a giant petri dish for the Sars-CoV-2 virus. As the death toll rises, Trump’s claims to global leadership have became more far-fetched. He told Republicans last week that he had had a round of phone calls with Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe and other unnamed world leaders and insisted “so many of them, almost all of them, I would say all of them” believe the US is leading the way.

None of the leaders he mentioned has said anything to suggest that was true. At each milestone of the crisis, European leaders have been taken aback by Trump’s lack of consultation with them – when he suspended travel to the US from Europe on 12 March without warning Brussels, for example. A week later, politicians in Berlin accused Trump of an “unfriendly act” for offering “large sums of money” to get a German company developing a vaccine to move its research wing to the US.

pastedGraphic.png

People gather to protest the stay-at-home orders outside the state capitol building in Sacramento, California, this month. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

The president’s abrupt decision to cut funding to the World Health Organization last month also came as a shock. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister, wrote on Twitter: “There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the coronavirus pandemic.”

A poll in France last week found Merkel to be far and away the most trusted world leader. Just 2% had confidence Trump was leading the world in the right direction. Only Boris Johnson and Xi Jinping inspired less faith.

A survey this week by the British Foreign Policy Group found 28% of Britons trusted the US to act responsibly on the world stage, a drop of 13 percentage points since January, with the biggest drop in confidence coming among Conservative voters.

Dacian Cioloș, a former prime minister of Romania who now leads the Renew Europe group in the European parliament, captured a general European view this week as the latest statistics on deaths in the US were reported.

“Post-truth communication techniques used by rightwing populism movements simply do not work to beat Covid-19,” he told the Guardian. “And we see that populism cost lives.”

Around the globe, the “America first” response pursued by the Trump administration has alienated close allies. In Canada, it was the White House order in April to halt shipments of critical N95 protective masks to Canadian hospitals that was the breaking point.

The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, who had previously spoken out in support of Trump on several occasions, said the decision was like letting a family member “starve” during a crisis.

‘It will disappear’: the disinformation Trump spread about the coronavirus – timeline

“When the cards are down, you see who your friends are,” said Ford. “And I think it’s been very clear over the last couple of days who our friends are.”

In countries known for chronic problems of governance, there has been a sense of wonder that the US appears to have joined their ranks.

. . . .

***********************

Read the full article at the above link.

Are we still “to be feared,” even if no longer admired or respected? Good question!

Probably, insofar as our collapse would take down a chunk of the world’s economy with it, leave a leadership vacuum, and change the balance of power, perhaps in favor of China, Russia, South Korea, Canada, and India. We also still have a big military and lots of sophisticated weapons, although modern terrorism has shown that sophistication in expensive weaponry is not always the “be all and end all” either for winning wars or causing mass disorder, death, and mayhem.

Still, as our civil governance and international influence disintegrates, what happens with and to our military is a huge concern and a “big X factor.” Will the tradition of  “civilian control over the military” also fall victim to the kakistocracy and the failure of civilian governing institutions? What’s happened to our intelligence community under the Trump kakistocracy is likely a bad omen.

Who would have thought that Trump could do so much permanent or at least long-term damage in such a short period of time? And who would have believed that our centuries-old constitutional and democratic institutions, meant to protect individual rights, enforce the rule of law, and check unrestrained abuses of power by a megalomaniac, yet highly incompetent, dishonest, dangerous, and evil Executive would have crumbled so quickly and performed so haplessly when confronted by a President and an unscrupulous, corrupt, authoritarian regime and party of toadies perfectly willing to press aggressively inane and illegal policies and false narratives to destroy the nation and everyone in it as a means of pillaging and enhancing their own power? 

Yet, here we are! Much of the rest of the world appears to “get” it. Yet tens of millions of Americans who continue to support and enable the kakistocracy don’t, or they simply don’t care about our nation and the common good.

This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!

PWS

05-15-20

🏴‍☠️BRING IT ON! – “Moscow Mitch” 🇷🇺 Throws Down The Gauntlet, Challenges Trump For “Vilest Pol In America” 🤮☠️ — Can He Beat A Guy Who Uses The “Bully’s Pulpit” To Encourage Americans To Drink & Inject Poison? ☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️ — Nobel Prize 🏆 Winning Economist Paul Krugman @ NY Times Tells Us How “MM” Can Go Even Lower: “So yes, McConnell’s position is stupid. But it’s also vile.”

Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman
American Economist, Columnist, & Nobel Prize Winner

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/opinion/mcconnell-coronavirus-states.html

 

Krugman writes, in part, in the NYT:

.  .  .  .

So yes, McConnell’s position is stupid. But it’s also vile.

Think of who would be hurt if state and local governments are forced to make drastic cuts. A lot of state money goes to Medicaid, a program that should be expanding, not shrinking, as millions of Americans are losing their health insurance along with their jobs.

As for the state and local government workers who may be either losing their jobs or facing pay cuts, most are employed in education, policing, firefighting and highways. So if McConnell gets his way, America’s de facto policy will be one of bailing out the owners of giant restaurant chains while firing schoolteachers and police officers.

Last but not least, let’s talk about McConnell’s hypocrisy, which like his stupidity comes on multiple levels.

At one level, it’s really something to see a man who helped ram through a giant tax cut for corporations — which they mainly used to buy back their own stock — now pretend to be deeply concerned about borrowing money to help states facing a fiscal crisis that isn’t their fault.

At another level, it’s also really something to see McConnell, whose state is heavily subsidized by the federal government, give lectures on self-reliance to states like New York that pay much more in federal taxes than they get back.

We’re not talking about small numbers here. According to estimates by the Rockefeller Institute, from 2015 to 2018 Kentucky — which pays relatively little in federal taxes, because it’s fairly poor, but gets major benefits from programs like Medicare and Social Security — received net transfers from Washington averaging more than $33,000 per person. That was 18.6 percent of the state’s G.D.P.

True, relatively rich states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut probably should be helping out their poorer neighbors — but those neighbors don’t then get the right to complain about “blue state bailouts” in the face of a national disaster.

Of course, McConnell has an agenda here: He’s hoping to use the pandemic to force afflicted states to shrink their governments. We can only hope both that this shameless exploitation of tragedy fails and that McConnell and his allies pay a heavy political price.

******************************

Read the rest of  Krugman’s article at the link.

Have we all just been transported to “Jonestown 1978” ☠︎⚰️☠️⚰️?” Is our “Clown Prince” 🤡 actually the reincarnation of Rev. Jim Jones 🏴‍☠️?

Tired of being in the “Blue Majority” supporting “Red America” while excluded from control of our National Government? Tired of a Government of self-centered grifters — incapable of governing responsibly and in the public interest, but great at lining their pockets and those of their fat cat backers? Tired of an “Amateur Night at the Bijou” foreign policy that diminishes our nation and makes us the laughingstock the world? Tired of dealing with dirty water, polluted air, and crumbling bridges while the “Chief Clown” 🤡 sharpens his golf game? Tired of a kakistocracy that’s also a kelptocracy 💸 and practices nepotism? Tired of expensive health care that too often doesn’t improve the health of our nation? Tired of wages stagnating and benefits disappearing while the stock market goes bonkers and execs and shareholders get big payouts? Tired of lousy, anti-democracy judges 👨‍⚖️ who advance the interests of corporations, guns, and the GOP over the rights and dignity of individuals under our laws? Tired of paying the salaries of Neo-Nazi bigots like Stephen Miller? Tired of funding the “Afternoon Clown Show” 🤡 from the White House every day and dealing with its never-ending stream of dangerous ☠️ lies, misrepresentations, and fabrications?

Vote ‘Em Out, Vote ‘Em Out!

This November, send the “Clown Prince” 🤡, MM 🤮, and the rest of their anti-American party of disunity, incompetence, disorder, cruelty, stupidity, racism, and grift packing!  Vote like your life depends on it! Because, it does!

PWS

04-24-20

 

FAILED STATE: America’s “Clown Prince” 🤡 More Like Infamous Marshal Petain Than Leader Of The Free World  — “But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader,” Says George Packer @ The Atlantic!🆘😰👨🏻‍⚖️

Henri Petain
Henri Petain
Famous French Collaborator/Traitor
Trump Clown
Donald J. Trump
Famous American Clown
George Packer
George Packer
American Journalist, Author, Playwright

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/underlying-conditions/610261/

Packer writes in The Atlantic:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

This article appears in the Special Preview: June 2020 issue.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.

Adam Chilton, Kevin Cope, Charles Crabtree, and Mila Versteeg: Red and blue America agree that now is the time to violate the Constitution

Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”

All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse.

This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.

Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.

David Frum: Americans are paying the price for Trump’s failures

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

Read: It pays to be rich during a pandemic

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

. . . .

*************

Read the rest of Packer’s article at the link.

Very discouraging. But, it’s not too late, yet. We have a chance in November to throw out the Trump/GOP Kakistocracy and start rebuilding America with a vision of the common good, common sense, and human dignity! Be the best, rather than running a “race to the bottom.”

Let’s consign Trump and his toadies to the same “dustbin of history” as Pétain and his collaborators!

This November, vote like your life depends on it. Because it does!

PWS

04-21-20

SUPREMES’ DISINGENUOUS ENABLING OF REGIME’S ILLEGAL & DANGEROUS WHITE NATIONALIST ANTI-IMMIGRANT AGENDA AIMED AT TERRORIZING COMMUNITIES OF COLOR WILL HELP SPREAD THE PANDEMIC — BONUS COVERAGE: My Latest Mini-Essay: “SUPREME COMPLICITY SPELLS SUPREME DANGER FOR ALL AMERICANS” ☠️☠️☠️☠️☠️👎🏻

Maanvi Singh
Maanvi Singh
Freelance Reporter

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/29/i-have-a-broken-heart-trump-policy-has-immigrants-backing-away-from-healthcare-amid-crisis?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Maanvi Singh reports for The Guardian:

As the coronavirus spread through California and the economic fallout of the pandemic began to hit Patricia’s community in the rural Coachella Valley, she said a new Trump administration policy had layered worries upon her worries.

The so-called “public charge” rule, which allows the government to deny green cards and visas to immigrants who rely on public benefits, went into effect in late February, just as the first cases of Covid-19 were being reported across the US.

“Now, we are in panic,” said Patricia, a 46-year-old mother of three and daughter of two elderly parents. The Guardian is not using Patricia’s real name to protect her and her undocumented family members.

Patricia’s father, who stopped seeking treatment for his pancreatic cancer after a lawyer advised that using some public medical benefits could affect his bid to gain legal status, is among the most at-risk for complications from contracting the coronavirus. So is her mother, who is diabetic.

“I have a broken heart,” she said. “We’ve been told that if we want papers to feel secure and calm here, there’s a tradeoff.”

‘I won’t survive’: Iranian scientist in US detention says Ice will let Covid-19 kill many

Although the US Citizenship and Immigration Services last week announced under pressure from lawmakers and advocacy groups that immigrants who undergo testing or treatment for Covid-19 would not be denied visas or green cards under the new rule, fear and confusion are stopping people from seeking medical care. In the midst of a pandemic, health and legal experts say that policies designed to exclude vulnerable immigrant communities from medical care are fueling a public health disaster.

“The community doesn’t trust the government right now.” said Luz Gallegos, who directs the Todec Legal Center in southern California. As Covid-19 spreads across the state, much of the center’s efforts recently have been dedicated to reassuring immigrants that they can and should take advantage of health programs if they can.

Patricia, who went to Todec for advice, said even though she’s been told that the public charge rule doesn’t apply to those who want to get tested for the coronavirus, she can’t help but worry. “With this president, you can never know,” she said. When immigration policies can change overnight, she said, “how can we have trust?”

Even before the public charge rules went into effect, a UCLA analysis found that more than 2 million Californians enrolled in the state’s public food and medical benefits programs could be affected by the rule, which allows immigration officials to turn away those seeking green cards and visas based on who are “likely to be a public charge”.

“We can’t stop the spread of disease while denying health coverage to people,” said Ninez Ponce, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “It’s irresponsible public health policy.”

Although several groups of immigrants, including asylum-seekers and refugees, are exempt from the rule, the complicated, 217-page regulation has a “chilling effect”, Ponce said, driving people to withdraw from social services even if they don’t have to.

. . . .

********************

Read the rest of Maanvi’s report at the link.

SUPREME COMPLICITY SPELLS SUPREME DANGER FOR ALL AMERICANS

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for Courtside

April 3, 2020

So, let’s be clear about what happened here with the so-called public charge regulations. The expert public commentary opposing this unlawful and unnecessary (i/o/w “stupid and malicious”) change in the regulations was overwhelming. 

The vast bulk of the 266,077 public comments received were in opposition!https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/12/06/complicit-9th-circuit-judges-continue-to-coddle-trump-this-time-legal-immigrants-are-the-victims-of-trumps-judicially-enabled-white-nationalist-agenda-judges-jay-bybee-sandra-i/

Support for the change outside of White Nationalist nativist “fringies” was negligible and had no basis in fact.

The Administration’s rationale, sacrificing health and welfare and screwing immigrants for some small fabricated savings that failed to consider the offsetting harm to the public and individuals, was facially absurd. 

A U.S. District Judge in New York immediately and properly found the regulation change to be unlawful and enjoined it. The Second Circuit upheld that injunction. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/01/08/finally-an-appeals-court-with-some-guts-2d-circuit-stands-up-to-regime-on-public-charge-injunction/

In the meantime, however, Appellate Judges in the 9th and 4th Circuits had gone “belly up” for Trump. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/12/10/complicit-court-update-4th-circuit-joins-9th-in-tanking-for-trump-on-public-charge-rule-judges-harvie-wilkinson-paul-niemeyer-go-belly-up-for-trump-while-judge-pame/

Trump Solicitor General Francisco fabricated an “emergency” reason for the Supremes to intervene in a process that was ongoing before the District Court in New York. The “J.R. Five” voted to be Francisco’s toadies and stay the injunction. The other justices voted to uphold the injunction and require the Trump regime to abide by the law and normal judicial procedures. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/15/linda-greenhouse-nyt-supremely-complicit-meanness-has-become-a-means-to-the-end-of-our-republic-for-j-r-his-gop-judicial-activists-on-the-supremes-what-if-they-had-to-wal/

The J.R. Five’s “toadyism for Trump” was so obvious that in a later related case Justice Sonia Sotomayor took the unusual step of filing a sharply worded dissent “outing” her colleagues for consistently “tilting” the process in favor of one party — Trump. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/22/complicity-watch-justice-sonia-sotomayor-calls-out-men-in-black-for-perverting-rules-to-advance-trump-miller-white-nationalist-nativist-immigration-agenda/

Then, the “real emergency” (as opposed to Francisco’s fabricated one) predicted by the health officials who had opposed the regulation change occurred. Now, immigrant families who often form the backbone of our “essential workforce” are at risk and they, in turn, will unavoidably spread the risk. Americans, citizens, residents, documented, undocumented, will unnecessarily die because the J.R. Five were derelict in their duties. 

The truth is very straightforward: “The coronavirus pandemic is ‘Exhibit A for why the public charge rule is stupid’ said Almas Sayeed, at the California Immigrant Policy Center.” Apparently, “Exhibit A” was too deep for the “J.R. Five” to grasp. 

The Constitution actually doesn’t enable the Executive to promulgate irrational policies that contradict both the best science and endanger the public health and welfare to achieve openly racist and xenophobic political goals. “Stupidity based on racism and ignorance” has no place in our Federal Government. 

As Mark Joseph Stern so clearly said in Slate:

Put simply: When some of the most despised and powerless among us ask the Supreme Court to spare their lives, the conservative justices turn a cold shoulder. When the Trump administration demands permission to implement some cruel, nativist, and potentially unlawful immigration restrictions, the conservatives bend over backward to give it everything it wants.

COMPLICITY WATCH: Justice Sonia Sotomayor Calls Out “Men In Black” For Perverting Rules To Advance Trump/Miller White Nationalist Nativist Immigration Agenda!

“Stupid” actually means “illegal” in this and most other cases. That such an an obvious concept is over the heads of the ideologically biased “J.R. Five” should give us all great pause. The next time these folks decide to elevate the “stupid” and the “racist” over “rational, legal, and humane,” it could be YOUR life and future going down their drain.

If we continue to empower a regime that elevates poorly qualified individuals who have lost any sense of human values and common decency they might have possessed to life tenure in the highest courts of our land, there will be no end to the avoidable human disasters, unnecessary suffering, and tragedies that will ensue. 

We need regime change in November! That won’t change the composition and qualifications of the Federal Judiciary overnight. But, it will be an absolutely necessary start toward a Government and a judiciary that understand and respect the Constitution, the rule of law, and the individual rights and human dignity of all persons before our laws. In other words, due process and equal justice for all.

Vote like you life depends on it. Because, it does!

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

03-30-20

THE DOJ’S NEW TITLE UNDER BILLY BARR: “HOOKERS FOR TRUMP” – “Why Bill Barr’s DOJ replaced Catholic Charities with Hookers for Jesus” – Why “There has never been a better time to be a Hooker for Jesus.”

Dana Milbank
Dana Milbank
Opinion Columnist
Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/11/why-bill-barrs-doj-replaced-catholic-charities-with-hookers-jesus/

 

Dana Milbank writes in WashPost:

There has never been a better time to be a Hooker for Jesus.

Under Attorney General Bill Barr’s management, it appears no corner of the Justice Department can escape perversion — even the annual grants the Justice Department gives to nonprofits and local governments to help victims of human trafficking.

In a new grant award, senior Justice officials rejected the recommendations of career officials and decided to deny grants to highly rated Catholic Charities in Palm Beach, Fla., and Chicanos Por La Causa in Phoenix. Instead, Reuters reported, they gave more than $1 million combined to lower-rated groups called the Lincoln Tubman Foundation and Hookers for Jesus.

Why? Well, it turns out the head of the Catholic Charities affiliate had been active with Democrats and the Phoenix group had opposed President Trump’s immigration policies. By contrast, Hookers for Jesus is run by a Christian conservative and the Lincoln Tubman group was launched by a relative of a Trump delegate to the 2016 convention.

That Catholic Charities has been replaced by Hookers for Jesus says much about Barr’s Justice Department. Friends of Trump are rewarded. Opponents of Trump are punished. And the nation’s law enforcement apparatus becomes Trump’s personal plaything.

Federal prosecutors Monday recommended that Trump associate Roger Stone serve seven to nine years in prison for obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, witness tampering and other crimes.

Then Trump tweeted that the proposed sentence was “horrible and very unfair” and “the real crimes were on the other side.” And by midday Tuesday, Barr’s Justice Department announced that it would reduce Stone’s sentence recommendation. All four prosecutors, protesting the politicization, asked to withdraw from the case.

But politicization is now the norm. Last week, Barr assigned himself the sole authority to decide which presidential candidates — Democrats and Republicans — should be investigated by the FBI.

Also last week, the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice Department, announced that New York state residents can no longer enroll in certain Trusted Traveler programs such as Global Entry — apparent punishment for the strongly Democratic state’s policies on illegal immigrants.

On Monday, Barr declared that the Justice Department had created an “intake process” to receive Rudy Giuliani’s dirt from Ukraine on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden — dirt dug in a boondoggle that left two Giuliani associates under indictment and Trump impeached.

The same day, Barr’s agency announced lawsuits against California, New Jersey and King County (Seattle), Washington — politically “blue” jurisdictions all — as part of what he called a “significant escalation” against sanctuary cities.

On Tuesday, to get a better sense of the man who has turned the Justice Department into Trump’s toy, I watched Barr speak to the Major County Sheriffs of America, a friendly audience, at the Willard Hotel in Washington.

Even by Trumpian standards, the jowly Barr, in his large round glasses, pinstripe suit and Trump-red tie, was strikingly sycophantic. “In his State of the Union, President Trump delivered a message of genuine optimism filled with an unapologetic faith in God and in American greatness and in the common virtues of the American people: altruism, industriousness, self-reliance and generosity,” he read, deadpan.

Trump, he went on, “loves this country,” and “he especially loves you.” The boot-licking performance continued, about Trump’s wise leadership, his unbroken promises and even the just-impeached president’s passionate belief in the “rule of law.”

Then Barr turned to the enemy. He attacked “rogue DA’s” and “so-called social-justice reformers,” who are responsible for “historic levels of homicide and other violent crime” in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore. Politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions, he said, prefer “to help criminal aliens evade the law.” Barr vowed to fight these foes with “all lawful means” — federal subpoenas to force them to turn over “information about criminal aliens,” dozens of lawsuits to invalidate statutes and attempts to deny them both competitive and automatic grants.

In response to a question, Barr railed against tech companies’ use of encryption: “They’re designing these devices so you can be impervious to any government scrutiny,” he protested.

Maybe people wouldn’t be so sensitive about government scrutiny if the top law enforcement official weren’t using his position to punish political opponents and reward political allies.

Instead, with Barr’s acquiescence, we live in a moment in which: Trump’s Treasury Department immediately releases sensitive financial information about Hunter Biden, while refusing to release similar information about Trump; Trump ousts officials who testified in the impeachment inquiry and even ousts the blameless twin brother of one of the witnesses; and Trump’s FBI decides to monitor violent “people on either side” of the abortion debate — although the FBI couldn’t point to a single instance of violence by abortion-rights supporters.

This week, the Pentagon released a new color scheme for Air Force One, replacing the 60-year-old design with one that looks suspiciously like the old Trump Shuttle.Surprised? Don’t be. Soon the entire administration will be able to apply for a Justice Department grant as a newly formed nonprofit: Hookers for Trump.

 

*********************************

Barr’s inspirational lesson for new lawyers: Once you achieve fame, fortune, and protection from corrupt politicos and complicit judges, it’s virtually impossible to get your law license revoked for unethical performance. As long as you thumb your nose at the law and ethical rules right in public, right in front of judges, you’re essentially immune. The “rules” only apply to those poor suckers at the bottom of the “legal totem pole.”

 

This is actually a fairly new development under the Trump regime. In the past, even high-profile lawyers who violated their ethical obligations got zapped: John Mitchell, Dick Kleindienst, Bill Clinton(technically, he might have “surrendered his law license” in lieu of disbarment), Webb Hubbell, etc.

 

But, during the Trump regime, Federal Judges seem content to just “roll their eyes” at lies, false narratives, thinly veiled racist or religiously bigoted rationales for policy, and simply astounding conflicts of interest (how about running a biased and unconstitutional Immigration “Court” right in plain view?) streaming out of an ethics-free zone at the “Department of Hookers for Trump.”

 

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson was actually a “target” of Roger Stone’s contemptuous and openly threatening behavior. It will be interesting to see how she deals with the sudden reversal and baseless plea for mercy from Barr for this unrepentant and totally unapologetic criminal.

 

As if to resolve any doubts as to his contempt for America and democratic institutions, the cowardly “Bully-in-Chief” unleashed an unprovoked twitter tirade against Judge Jackson and the career prosecutors in the case.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/12/trump-stone-judge/

 

Perhaps predictability, this was followed by an impotent call by Senate Democrats for the uber corrupt Billy Barr to resign and for the equally corrupt and spineless Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to stop slithering around the Capitol and schedule an “investigative hearing” into improper political influence at the “Department of Hookers for Trump.” https://apple.news/Az2hAo6yqT8uKJSuAX26F1Q  Don’t hold your breath,  folks!

 

At the same time, former DOJ Inspector General Michael R. Bromwich was telling WashPost’s Greg Sargent that the conduct of Trump and Billy the Toady was an “existential threat to the institutions that most of us value, prize and have served.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/12/trump-openly-corrupts-doj-former-insider-sounds-alarm/.  Right on with that!

This is not “normal.” This is not “right.” It’s time for those of us who still believe in American democracy to take a stand in November to remove Trump and the sociopathic element that he represents in our society from power. Otherwise, the “race to the bottom” will continue, unabated. And more innocent people will be hurt by or die because of this unprincipled, totally immoral lunatic.

PWS

02-12-20

 

 

GROSS NATIONAL DISGRACE: “A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts — Fernanda Echavarri Reports For Mother Jones On How Our Failed Justice System Daily Abuses The Most Vulnerable While Feckless Legislators &   Smugly Complicit Article III Judges Look On & Ignore The Human Carnage They Are Enabling — “ Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.”

Fernanda Echavarri
Fernanda Echavarri
Reporter
Mother Jones

https://apple.news/AyKjNs5gOQJqIJ2_IeeQvcg

Fernanda Echavarri reports for Mother Jones:

“A Fucking Disaster That Is Designed to Fail”: How Trump Wrecked America’s Immigration Courts

SAN DIEGO IMMIGRATION COURT, COURTROOM #2;
PRESIDING: JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR

Lee O’Connor has been in his courtroom for all of two minutes before a look of annoyance washes over his face.

Eleven children and six adults—all of them from Central America, all of them in court for the first time—sit on the wooden benches before him. They’ve been awake since well before dawn so they could line up at the US-Mexico border to board government buses headed to immigration court in downtown San Diego, Kevlar-vested federal agents in tow. Like the dozens of families jam-packed into the lobby and the six other courtrooms, they’ve been waiting out their asylum cases in Mexico, often for months, as part of the Trump administration’s controversial border policy, the Migrant Protection Protocols.

O’Connor has a docket full of MPP cases today, like every day. Before he gets to them, though, he quickly postpones a non-MPP case to January 2021, explaining to a man and his attorney that he simply doesn’t have time for them today, motioning to the families in the gallery. While he’s doing this, the little girl in front of me keeps asking her mom if she can put on the headphones that play a Spanish translation of the proceedings. A guard motions the little girl to be quiet. 

For months, immigration attorneys and judges have been complaining that there’s no fair way to hear the cases of the tens of thousands of Central Americans who have been forced to remain on the Mexican side of the border while their claims inch through the courts. MPP has further overwhelmed dockets across the country and pushed aside cases that already were up against a crippling backlog that’s a million cases deep, stranding immigration judges in a bureaucratic morass and families with little hope for closure anytime in the near future.

I went last month to San Diego—home to one of the busiest MPP courts, thanks to its proximity to Tijuana and the more than 20,000 asylum seekers who now live in shelters and tent cities there—expecting to see logistical chaos. But I was still surprised at how fed up immigration judges like O’Connor were by the MPP-driven speedup—and by the extent to which their hands were tied to do anything about it.

Once O’Connor is done rescheduling his non-MPP case, he leans forward to adjust his microphone, rubs his forehead, and starts the group removal hearing. The interpreter translates into Spanish, and he asks if the adults understand. “Sí,” they say nervously from the back of the courtroom. O’Connor goes down his list, reading their names aloud with a slight Spaniard accent, asking people to identify themselves when their names are called. He reprimands those who do not speak up loud enough for him to hear.

O’Connor, who was appointed to the bench in 2010, is known for being tough: Between 2014 and 2019, he has denied 96 percent of asylum cases. He explains to the migrants that they have the right to an attorney, although one will not be provided—there are no public defenders in immigration court. O’Connor acknowledges finding legal representation from afar is difficult, but he tells them it’s not impossible. He encourages them to call the five pro bono legal providers listed on a sheet of paper they received that day. The moms sitting in front of me have their eyes locked on the Spanish interpreter, trying to absorb every bit of information. Their kids try their best to sit quietly.

As he thumbs through the case files, O’Connor grows increasingly frustrated: None of them has an address listed. “The government isn’t even bothering to do this,” he grumbles. The documents for MPP cases list people’s addresses as simply “Domicilio Conocido,” which translates to “Known Address.” This happens even when people say they can provide an address to a shelter in Mexico or when they have the address of a relative in the United States who can receive their paperwork. “I’ve seen them do this in 2,000 cases since May,” O’Connor says, and the Department of Homeland Security “hasn’t even bothered to investigate.” He looks up at the DHS attorney with a stern look on his face, but she continues shuffling paperwork around at her desk.

O’Connor picks up a blue form and explains to the group that they have to change their address to a physical location. The form is only in English; many of the adults seem confused and keep flipping over their copies as he tells them how to fill it out. O’Connor tells them they have to file within a week—perhaps better to do it that day, he says—but it’s unclear to me how they could follow his exacting instructions without the help of an attorney. He points out other mistakes in the paperwork filed by DHS and wraps up the hearing after about 45 minutes. The families don’t know that’s typical for a first hearing and seem perplexed when it ends. 

O’Connor schedules the group to come back for their next hearing in five weeks at 8:30 a.m. That will mean showing up at the San Ysidro port of entry at 4:30 a.m.; the alternative, he says, is being barred from entering the United States and seeking forms of relief for 10 years. “Do you understand?” he asks. The group responds with a hesitant “Sí.”

The Trump administration designed MPP to prevent people like them from receiving asylum, and beyond that, from even seeking it in the first place. First implemented in San Diego in late January 2019 to help stem the flow of people showing up at the southern border, the policy has since sent somewhere between 57,000 and 62,000 people to dangerous Mexican cities where migrants have been preyed upon for decades. Their cases have been added to an immigration court that already has a backlog of 1,057,811 cases—up from 600,000 at the time when Obama left office—according to data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

The skyrocketing immigration court backlog

View on the original site.

According to immigration judge Ashley Tabaddor, who spoke to me in her capacity as union president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, MPP has constituted a fundamental change to the way courts are run. DHS, she says, is “creating a situation where they’re physically, logistically, and systematically creating all the obstacles and holding all the cards.” The MPP program has left the court powerless, “speeding up the process of dehumanizing the individuals who are before the court and deterring anyone from the right to seek protection” All this while the Department of Justice is trying to decertify Tabbador’s union—the only protection judges have, and the only avenue for speaking publicly about these issues—by claiming its members are managers and no longer eligible for union membership. Tabaddor says the extreme number of cases combined with the pressure to process them quickly is making it difficult for judges to balance the DOJ’s demands with their oath of office.

Immigration attorneys in El Paso, San Antonio, and San Diego have told me they are disturbed by the courtroom disarray: the unanswered phones, unopened mail, and unprocessed filings. Some of their clients are showing up at border in the middle of the night only to find that their cases have been rescheduled. That’s not only unfair, one attorney told me, “it’s dangerous.” Central Americans who speak only indigenous languages are asked to navigate court proceedings with Spanish interpreters. One attorney in El Paso had an 800-page filing for an asylum case that she filed with plenty of time for the judge to review, but it didn’t make it to the judge in time. 

As another lawyer put it, “The whole thing is a fucking disaster that is designed to fail.”

Guillermo Arias/Getty People line up at the San Ysidro border crossing in Tijuana in May 2019.

COURTROOM #4; PRESIDING: JUDGE PHILIP LAW

Down the hall, a Honduran woman I’ll call Mari stands up next to her attorney and five-year-old son, raises her right hand, and is sworn in. 

Mari’s hearing isn’t much of a hearing at all. Stephanie Blumberg, an attorney with Jewish Family Service of San Diego, who is working the case pro bono, asks for more time because she only recently took the case; Judge Philip Law says he will consolidate the cases of mother and child into one; and he schedules her next hearing for the following week at 7:30 a.m., with a call time of 3:30 a.m. at the border.

Just as it’s about to wrap up, Bloomberg says her client is afraid to return to Mexico. “I want to know what is going to happen with me. I don’t want to go back to Mexico—it’s terrible,” Mari says in Spanish, an interpreter translating for the judge. “I have no jurisdiction over that,” Law says. “That’s between you and the Department of Homeland Security.” Law then turns to the DHS attorney, who says he’ll flag the case and “pass it along.”

While nine families begin their MPP group hearing, Mari tells me back in the waiting room that she and her son crossed the border in Texas and then asked for asylum. They were detained for two days and then transported by plane to San Diego, where she was given a piece of paper with a date and time for court and then released in Tijuana. She didn’t know anyone, barely knew where she was, and, trying to find safety in numbers, stuck with the group released that day. Two days after US immigration officials sent her to Tijuana, she was raped.

Mari’s voice gets shaky, and she tries to wipe the tears from her eyes, but even the cotton gloves she’s wearing aren’t enough to keep her face dry. I tell her we can end the conversation and apologize for making her relive those moments. She looks at her son from across the room and says she’d like to continue talking.

“I thought about suicide,” she whispers. “I carried my son and thought about jumping off a bridge.” Instead, she ended up walking for a long time, not knowing what to do or what would happen to them because they didn’t have a safe place to go.

“I haven’t talked to my family back home—it’s so embarrassing because of the dream I had coming here, and now look,” she says. “We’re discriminated against in Mexico; people make fun of us and the way we talk.” Her boy was already shy but has become quieter and more distrusting in recent months.

In the last year, I’ve spoken to dozens of migrants in border cities like Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana who share similarly horrific stories. Human Rights First has tracked more than 800 public reports of torture, kidnapping, rape, and murder against asylum seekers sent to Mexico in the last year. A lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Center for Gender and Refugee Studies is challenging MPP on the grounds that it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the “United States’ duty under international human rights law” not to return people to dangerous conditions.

“The system has not been set up to handle this in any way,” says Kate Clark, senior director of immigration services with Jewish Family Service of San Diego, one of the groups listed on the pro bono sheet Judge O’Connor handed out earlier in the day. They’re the only ones with a WhatsApp number listed, and their phones are constantly ringing because “it’s clear that people don’t know what’s going on or what to expect—and they’re in fear for their lives,” Clark says. Still, her 8-person team working MPP cases can only help a small percentage of the people coming through the courtroom every day.

Later that afternoon, shortly after 5, two large white buses pull up to the court’s loading dock. Guards in green uniforms escort about 60 people out from the loading dock. Moms, dads, and dozens of little kids walk in a straight light to get on a bus. They are driven down to the border and sent back to Tijuana later that night.

A few days later, Mari’s attorney tells me that despite raising a fear of retuning to Mexico in court, US port officials sent Mari back to Tijuana that night.

COURTROOM #2; PRESIDING: JUDGE LEE O’CONNOR

I find myself back in O’Connor’s courtroom for his afternoon MPP hearings. This time, the only people with legal representation is a Cuban family who crossed in Arizona in July 2019 and turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents. This is their first time in court, and their attorney calls in from out of state.

Right away, O’Connor wants to address a different kind of clerical error from the one that bothered him earlier in the day—and one that he thinks matters even more. It involves the first document that DHS issues to “removable” immigrants, known as a Notice to Appear (NTA) form. Although the form allows agents to check a box to categorize people based on how they encountered immigration officials, O’Connor points out that in this case it was left blank—and that “this is fairly typical of the overwhelming majority of these cases.”

He isn’t the first or only judge to notice this; I heard others bring up inconsistent and incomplete NTAs. Border officials are supposed to note on the form if the people taken into custody are “arriving aliens,” meaning they presented at the port of entry asking for asylum, or “aliens present in the United States who have not been admitted or paroled,” meaning they first entered illegally in between ports of entry. Thousands of MPP cases have forms without a marked category. As far as O’Connor is concerned, that’s a crucial distinction. He believes that this Trump administration policy shouldn’t apply to people who entered the country without authorization—meaning countless immigrants who applied for MPP should be disqualified from the get-go.

In the case of the Cuban family, like dozens more that day, the DHS attorney filed an amended NTA classifying them as “arriving aliens.” O’Connor points out is not how they entered the United States. The DHS attorney is unphased by the judge’s stern tone and came prepared with piles of new forms for the other cases of incomplete NTAs. The family’s lawyer says maybe the government made a mistake. O’Connor, unsatisfied, interrupts her: “There was no confusion. I’ve seen 2,000 of theseâ¦the government is not bothering to spend the time.” After a lengthy back-and-forth, a testy O’Connor schedules the family to come back in three weeks.

O’Connor’s stance and rulings on this issue have broader implications. He terminated a case in October because a woman had entered the country illegally before turning herself in and wrote in his decision that DHS had “inappropriately subjected respondent to MPP.” He is among the loudest voices on this issue, saying that MPP is legal only when applied to asylum-seekers presenting at legal ports of entry—though it’s unclear to many lawyers what it might mean for their clients to have their cases terminated in this way. Would these asylum seekers end up in immigration detention facilities? Would they be released under supervision in the United States? Would they be deported back to their home countries?

Since MPP cases hit the courts last March, asylum attorneys have been critical of DHS for not answering these questions. I was present for the very first MPP hearing in San Diego and saw how confused and frustrated all sides were that DHS didn’t seem to have a plan for handling these cases. Now, almost a year later, little has changed.

Tabaddor, the union president, tells me that “there are definitely legal issues that the MPP program has presented” and that judges are having to decide whether the documents “are legally sufficient.” “The issue with DHS—frankly, from what I’ve heard—is that it seems like they’re making it up as they go,” she says.

Last week, Tabaddor testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee and for the independence of immigration courts from the political pressures of federal law enforcement. There are approximately 400 immigration judges across more than 60 courts nationwide, and almost half of those judges have been appointed during the Trump era. (According to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, dozens of judges are quitting or retiring early because their jobs have become “unbearable” under Trump.)

California Democrat Zoe Lofgren, an immigrants’ rights supporter in Congress, argued during the hearing that the immigration courts are in crisis and the issue requires urgent congressional attention. “In order to be fully effective, the immigration court system should function just like any other judicial institution,” she said. “Immigration judges should have the time and resources to conduct full and fair hearings, but for too long, the courts have not functioned as they should—pushing the system to the brink.”

Guillermo Arias/Getty Asylum seekers in Tijuana in October

COURTROOM #1; PRESIDING: JUDGE SCOTT SIMPSON

“I don’t want any more court,” a woman from Guatemala pleads just before lunchtime. “No more hearings, please.”

Unlike many of the people who were there for their first hearing when I observed court in San Diego, this woman has been to court multiple times since mid-2019. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t find a lawyer, she tells Judge Scott Simpson. She’s had enough.

“We’ve reached a fork on the road, ma’am,” Simpson says in a warm, calm tone. “You either ask for more time for an attorney to help you or you represent yourself.”

“No, it’d be a loss since I don’t know anything about the law,” the woman responds, her voice getting both louder and shakier. Simpson explains to her again the benefits of taking time to find an attorney.

“It’s been almost a year. I don’t want to continue the case. I want to leave it as is,” she tells him. After more explanation from the judge, the woman says she’d like to represent herself today so that decisions can be made. Simpson asks what she would like to do next, and the woman says, “I want you to end it.”

This woman’s pleas are increasingly common. Tabaddor says MPP has taken “an already very challenging situation and [made] it exponentially worse.” The new reality in immigration courts “is logistically and systematically designed to just deter people from seeking or availing themselves of the right to request protection,” Tabaddor says.

After hearing the Guatemalan woman ask for the case to be closed multiple times, Simpson takes a deep breath, claps his hands, and says there are four options: withdrawal, administrative close, dismissal, or termination. He explains each one, and after 10 minutes the woman asks for her case to be administratively closed. The DHS attorney, however, denies that request. Simpson’s hands are tied.

The judge tells the woman that because DHS filed paperwork on her case that day, and because it’s only in English, that he’s going to give her time to review it, because “as the judge I don’t think it would be fair for you to go forward without the opportunity to object to that.” He schedules her to come back in a month.

“MPP is not a program I created,” he says. “That decision was made by someone else.” 

Additional reporting by Noah Lanard.

**********************

“Malicious incompetence,” “Aimless Docket Reshuffling,” “Man’s Inhumanity to Man” — it’s all there on public display in this deadly “Theater of the Absurd.”

Here, from a recent Human Rights Watch report on over 200 of those illegally returned to El Salvador without Due Process and in violation of the rule of law:

138 Killed;

70 Sexually abused, tortured, or otherwise harmed.

Here is the HRW report as posted on Courtside:

https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/06/how-americas-killer-courts-promote-crimes-against-humanity-human-rights-watch-trump-his-white-nationalist-sycophants-toadies-tout-lawless-policies-that-violate-legal-obligations-he/

Where, oh where, has our humanity and human decency gone?

And, how do spineless jurists on Article III Courts who continue to “rubber stamp” and overlook the disgraceful abrogation of Due Process and fundamental fairness going on in a grotesquely biased and mismanaged “court system” controlled by a White Nationalist, nativist regime look at themselves in the mirror each morning. Maybe they don’t.

Abuse of the most vulnerable among us might seem to them to be “below the radar screen.” After all, their victims often die, disappear, or are orbited back to unknown fates in dangerous foreign lands. Out of sign, out of mind! But, what if it were their spouses, sons, and daughters sent to Tijuana to be raped while awaiting a so-called “trial.”

Rather than serving its intended purpose, promoting courage to stand up against government tyranny and to defend the rights of individuals, even the downtrodden and powerless, against Government abuse of the law, life tenure has apparently become something quite different. That is, a refuge from accountability and the rules of human decency.

John Roberts, his “Gang of Five,” and the rest of the Article III enablers will escape any legal consequences for their actions and, perhaps more significant, inactions in the face of unspeakable abuses of our Constitution, the rule of law, intellectual honesty, and the obligations we owe to other human beings.

How about those cowardly 9th Circuit Judges who ignored the law, betrayed human decency, and enabled rapes, killings, and other “crimes against humanity” by “green lighting” the unconstitutional and clearly illegal “MPP” — better known as “Let ‘Em Die in Mexico” with their absurdist legal gobbledygook in Innovation Law Lab v. McAleenan. They are enjoying life in the ivory tower while their human victims are suffering and dying.

But, folks like Fernanda and many others are recording their abuses which will live in history and infamy, will forever tarnish their records, and be a blot on their family names for generations to come. 

There is no excuse for what is happening at our borders and in our Immigration Courts today. Constantly Confront Complicit Courts 4 Change! Flood the Article IIIs with examples and constant reminders of their handiwork and dereliction of duty! Let the bodies pile up on their collective doorsteps until the stench is so great that even they can no longer ignore and paper over their own complicity and moral responsibility with legal banalities. Force them to see their own faces and the faces of their loved ones in the scared, tormented faces and ruined lives of those destroyed by our scofflaw regime and its enablers. 

Also, if you haven’t already done so, tell your Congressional representatives that you have had enough of this grotesque circus!

Here’s what I wrote to my legislators, and some from other states, recently:

I hope you will also speak out frequently against the grotesque abuses of human rights, Due Process, and human decency, not to mention the teachings of Jesus Christ and almost all other religious traditions, that the Trump Administration is carrying out against refugees of color, many of them desperate and vulnerable women and children, at our Southern Border.

Additionally, under Trump, the U.S. Immigration Courts, absurdly and unconstitutionally located within a politically biased U.S. Department of Justice, have become a mockery of justice, Due Process, and fundamental fairness. I urge you to join with other legislators in abolishing the current failed (1.1 million case backlog) and unfair system and replacing it with an independent Article I U.S. Immigration Court. It’s time to end the abuse! This must be one of our highest national priorities.

I invite you and your staff to read more about the grotesque abuses of law, human rights, and fundamental human decency being committed daily on migrants and other vulnerable humans by the Trump Administration in my blog: immigrationcourtside.com, “The Voice of the New Due Process Army.” This is not the America I knew and proudly served for more than three decades as a Federal employee.

Due Process Forever; Trump’s Perverted View of America Never!

Thanks again.

With my appreciation and very best wishes,

Paul Wickham Schmidt

U.S. Immigration Judge (Retired)

Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Law

Due Process Forever; Complicit Courts & Feckless Legislators, Never!

PWS

02-07-20

 

TRUMP SIGNS CEASE-FIRE IN HIS WAR ON AMERICA!

TRUMP SIGNS CEASE-FIRE IN HIS WAR ON AMERICA!

TAKEAWAYS

  • Trump is an idiot

  • A very dangerous one

  • Who couldn’t negotiate his way out of a paper bag

  • The GOP has nothing but contempt for our country, our Government, our workers, and the collective intelligence of our people

  • Together, Trump and the GOP are the biggest threat to our nation since the Civil War

  • We’re not ”back to ground zero;” Trump has inflicted perhaps irreparable damage on America

  • America’s greatness is based heavily on the basic honesty, professionalism, dedication, and competence of its civil servants; Trump has broken, perhaps irrevocably, the bond of trust and respect with civil servants

  • Our survival as a nation over the next two years will largely depend on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s political skills in limiting the damage Trump and the GOP can inflict on our country

PWS

01-26-19

COLBERT I. KING @ WASHPOST: NATION IN REGRESSION: Trump & His White Nationalist Flunkies Are An Insult To All That Rev. Martin Luther King & His Supporters, Of All Races & Religions Stood For! — From the promise of guaranteed rights to a return to the insecurity of injustice. A pluralistic America is being cynically drawn along racial lines by a president who is as far from the civility of his predecessors Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton and Obama as the charter of the Confederacy was from the Constitution.” — But, The New Due Process Army Continues MLK’s Legacy!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/martin-luther-king-jr-would-be-outraged/2019/01/18/e4a7b4c6-1a75-11e9-8813-cb9dec761e73_story.html

Colby King writes:

. . . .

The greatest contrast between the time King led the struggle for America’s legal and social transformation and now is a White House occupied by Donald Trump.

There is a long list of ways in which backtracking on civil and human rights has occurred since the election of a president who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. It ranges from discriminatory travel bans against Muslims to turning a federal blind eye to intentionally racially discriminatory state voter-suppression schemes, to opposing protections for transgender people, to inhumanely separating children from families seeking to enter the country.

Sadly, that’s not all that stands out.

Once the federal locus of the nation’s quest for racial reconciliation, today’s White House is a source of racial divisiveness and a beacon to the prejudice-warped fringes of American society. It’s no surprise that the FBI found hate crimes in America rose 17 percent in 2017, the third consecutive year that such crimes increased. In King’s day, racially loaded, hateful rhetoric could be heard across the length and breadth of the Deep South. Now, mean, disgusting and inflammatory words come out of the mouth of the president of the United States.

From the promise of guaranteed rights to a return to the insecurity of injustice. A pluralistic America is being cynically drawn along racial lines by a president who is as far from the civility of his predecessors Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton and Obama as the charter of the Confederacy was from the Constitution.

King, and the movement he led, would be outraged. The rest of us should be, too.

**************************************

Read the full op-ed at the above link.

Very powerful! King speaks truth, reason, and humanity — in the spirit of Dr. King. Contrast that with the vile slurs, bogus race-baiting narratives, and non-policies spewing from the mouth of our racist (and incompetent) Liar/Grifter-in-Chief!

Two of my favorite MLK quotes (from the Letter from the Birmingham Jail — with acknowledgment to the Legal Aid and Justice Center from their poster hanging in my “office”)):

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Thanks to those many courageous and dedicated individuals tirelessly serving America in the New Due Process Army by resisting Trump’s illegal and anti-American policies! You, indeed, are the 21st Century continuation of Dr. King’s legacy to our country and the world! Dr. King would be proud of you! Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-21-19

MARY PAPENFUSS & PROFESSOR LAWRENCE LESSIG @ HUFFPOST: TRUMP & THE GOP ARE THE REAL EXISTENTIAL THREATS TO NATIONAL SECURITY! — ““The fools are they who enable this constitutional immorality,” Lessig wrote. “Those fools are the Senate Republicans, who have placed party over country, and President Trump over the Republican Party.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lawrence-lessig-donald-trump-national-emergency_us_5c32b2eae4b0d75a98320eae

Papenfuss reports:

Constitutional law expert and Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig dismissed President Donald Trump’s characterization of the immigrant situation at the Mexican border as a crisis on Sunday, then said the real national emergency was “this president.”

Asked about Trump’s threat to declare a national emergency on the southern border so that he can order his wall built without congressional approval, Lessig told MSNBC: “The man is using words that have no connection to reality.”

“He says we have a national crisis … a national emergency. I agree we have a national emergency, but the emergency is this president,” Lessig added. “The emergency is the fact we don’t have an executive who’s exercising his power in a responsible way.”

Lessig said the president can’t build his wall without the backing of Congress.

“Ultimately he has no constitutional authority to exercise the power to build this wall without Congress’ approval,” Lessig said. “These statutes were certainly not written with the intent to give a man like Donald Trump the power that he’s now claiming.”

In an opinion piece Lessig published in The Guardian on Friday, he said the Constitution would not uphold the actions of a president who shut down the government to insist on a program that was not supported by the public. Lessing referred to the situation as a “veto-ocracy,” ruled by “petulance” rather than “principle.”

If the Republicans support Trump in this, they are saying that any president can “support whatever policy he likes,” including, say, to nationalize health insurance.

“The fools are they who enable this constitutional immorality,” Lessig wrote. “Those fools are the Senate Republicans, who have placed party over country, and President Trump over the Republican Party.”

******************************

Part of the blame for this unprecedented national disaster belongs to the Supremes’ majority for their shockingly spineless performance in the “Travel Ban Case.” By failing to stand up for the Constitution in the face of Trump’s clear record of religious and racial bias and the rest of his White Nationalist hokum, their message was clear.

Whenever Trump doesn’t want to follow the law or is thwarted by Constitutional separation of powers, all he needs to do is declare another totally bogus “national emergency.” Will the GOP appointees keep looking away while the Constitution and our republic crumble before this unscrupulous madman? Or, will Chief Justice Roberts and some of the “Gang of Five” make good on Roberts’s recent claim that “there are no GOP or Democratic Federal Judges?”

Last time it was Muslims and refugees; this time, it’s asylum seekers, kids, and families in Trump’s crosshairs; next time, maybe he’ll come for the Supremes themselves. If so, they shouldn’t look to the immoral and cowardly GOP Senate for any help!

PWS

01-08-19