🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️⚖️ MAKING THEIR CASE: The Competition For “America’s Most Dangerous Court” 🏆🤮 Is Fierce, But The Far-Right Scofflaw Fifth Circuit Is Coming On Strong! — The Righty Supremes Fight Back With Gross Abuses Of “Shadow Docket” — Is There Another “Top Contender” Out There Operating Below The Radar Screen?

These two op-eds make compelling cases for the 5th Circuit rivaling the Supremes as the most scofflaw, out of control, and dangerous court in America! But, hey, is there a “dark horse” in this righty “race to the bottom?” 🐴 (Curiously enough, “owned” and “trained” by Biden-Garland Stables!)

First, let’s hear from my friend, NDPA Stalwart, Houston Law Immigration Clinic Director, Professor Geoffrey Hoffman:

Professor Geoffrey Hoffman
Professor Geoffrey Hoffman
Immigraton Clinic Director
University of Houston Law Center

CAT a “dead letter” in the Fifth Circuit? I respectfully dissent

 

By Geoffrey A. Hoffman

 

This week a panel of the Fifth Circuit issued Tabora Gutierrez v. Garland, interpreting the Convention Against Torture’s (CAT’s) state action requirement so restrictively that it led the dissenting judge to call CAT a virtual “dead letter” in most cases (in the Fifth Circuit, at least).

 

In this piece, I want to consider this dire prognostication and also think about what it may mean for future practice – at least for those of us in the Fifth Circuit.

 

Two panel members found that petitioner failed a key requirement for relief: that the government in Honduras “consented or acquiesced” to the torture. In dissent, Judge W. Eugene Davis remarked, “I agree with the IJ, the BIA, and the majority that [petitioner] will likely be tortured by MS-13 gang members. . .[but] I read the record to compel a conclusion that the torture will be with the acquiescence of a public official.” According to Judge Davis, the majority raised the bar so high regarding this requirement under CAT that “for most if not all” people CAT will be out of reach, if they are from countries with (merely) corrupt policy or police without the will or courage to protect them from brutal gangs.  While I agree with Judge Davis, the fact is CAT need not be a “dead letter” in the Fifth Circuit.

 

I was moved to comment on another split panel decision previously in the Fifth Circuit in Inestroza-Antonelli v. Barr, see my prior post here, and I am similarly moved to write about this present decision.

 

Significantly, the majority here carefully acknowledges up front that the BIA and IJ below found petitioner “likely to be tortured or killed” if returned to Honduras, and even catalogued the horrible injuries he had already suffered, mentioning “gruesome photos” that are part of the record in the case.

 

Because I think the majority erred, and would agree with most of what the dissenting judge says, let me address three issues where I think the majority got it wrong: (1) what it means for a record to “compel” a different conclusion on appeal; (2) what it means for a government to consent or acquiesce to torture and (3) the notion that Petitioner waived his argument about the correct standard of review merely by failing to bring it up in a motion to reconsider.

 

I address all three of these points below.

 

First, the majority importantly conceded in its opinion that the police “failed to investigate” petitioner’s injuries. However, because the Board and IJ interpreted these “failures” of the police as “better explained” by the fact the petitioner “was unable to disclose the specific identity of any of his attackers” this showed the police did not “willfully ignore” the attacks. The majority reasoned that the “evidence” did not “compel” a contrary conclusion and therefore the IJ’s findings, adopted by the BIA, were considered “conclusive.”

 

I am struck here by the notion that just because the BIA and IJ had inserted their own explanations for the unrebutted record evidence showing lack of any police action that this must have meant (according to the majority) that the appellate court was constrained to accept this explanation and would not disturb the lower tribunal’s interpretation of the evidence.

 

Such a reading of the word “compel” means that judges can have an “out” anytime they want to rubber stamp any decision of the Board, all they have to do is say the explanation offered characterizing the evidence in one way or another was good enough and must not be disturbed. But this is a very troubling proposition.

 

Take, for example, the present case where the supposition on the part of the BIA and IJ was that the petitioner was somehow at fault for not being able to identify his attackers by name. Think about that for a minute…Police are not acquiescing and not at fault and should not be held to have “turned a blind eye” because the victim was unable to identify his attackers.

 

But this does not make sense.

 

Such a blame-the-victim mentality goes against the motivation and underlying rationale behind other federal types of relief immigrants have available, for example, U visas for crime victims, VAWA, T visas, etc., premised in many cases on the victim’s cooperation with law enforcement and their investigation. Just because a victim does not know the exact identities of their attackers does not disqualify them from relief. Would that be a reasonable interpretation for example of the U visa statute and attendant regulations?

 

In addition, let’s consider the use of the “compel” standard for a minute and where it came from exactly. This standard, as acknowledged by the majority, comes from a previous case, Chen v. Gonzales, 470 F.3d 1131, 1134 (5th Cir. 2006), among other cases.  Chen in turn cites 8 USC 1252(b)(4)(B) and emanates from the Supreme Court’s famous decision, INS v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478 (1992), authored by Justice Scalia.

 

Chen was a case about a Chinese petitioner who converted to Christianity after entry into the U.S. and so her applications did not rely on past persecution but a well-founded fear of future persecution based on religion. The IJ in the former case found that there were “many Christians in China” and that Chen’s claims of future persecution were allegedly “highly speculative.”  The facts of Chen and the current case relating to police inaction in Honduras could not be further apart. Moreover, the Fifth Circuit in Chen was not considering past persecution, as here, but the more difficult to prove “future persecution” and well-founded fear standard.

 

Similarly, Justice Scalia in Elias-Zacarias was concerned about proof supporting a political opinion claim.  In that case, the Supreme Court found that the petitioner could not produce evidence “so compelling” that no reasonable factfinder could fail to find the requisite fear of persecution on account of political opinion.  The “so compelling” language has been used by many courts to deny asylum on many other grounds throughout the past decades and has not been limited to political opinion claims.

 

But the reliance in the present case for the “compel” standard on the statute in question, 8 USC 1252(b) here is misguided. The statute states in pertinent part as follows:  “the administrative findings of fact are conclusive unless any reasonable adjudicator would be compelled to conclude to the contrary . . . .”  But the “consent and acquiescence” determination under CAT is not a determination of “administrative facts” but is certainly a mixed question of law and fact.  As such, the entire structure of the “compel” standard should not have been applied but instead de novo review applied.

 

And this brings me to the practice pointer that this case so unfortunately stands for. Although on appeal before the circuit court the issue of standard of review was raised by petitioner, it was rejected by the majority on the theory that he had to have filed a “motion to reconsider” before the Board to preserve the issue for appellate review.

 

This waiver argument has always seemed to me a weak and tenuous one.

 

For example, what if the petitioner (i.e., the respondent before the BIA) argued in his brief to the Board that the correct standard of review was de novo due to the mixed question raised by a very complicated “consent or acquiescence” determination under CAT, and courts have so held, but the BIA decided to just rubber stamp the IJ and refused to overturn the IJ’s finding based on clear error. Wouldn’t that have preserved the issue?  Why is there a need for a litigant to then file a motion to reconsider after  the fact to preserve an issue which had already been preserved?  To make matters worse it appears Mr. Tobora Gutierrez appeared pro se, see page 3 of the Fifth Circuit majority decision, at least initially. The decision does not reveal if he had appellate counsel before the BIA. But if he did not it would be an especially onerous requirement to impose an “after the fact” requirement that a litigant must file a “motion to reconsider” to preserve an issue for appellate review, especially if he is unrepresented.

 

All of that said, the practice take-away here is: (1) everyone must file a very carefully drafted and thorough motion to reconsider on all issues that could be in any way (mis-)interpreted to be subject to waiver so you preserve all issues for review before the circuit courts;  and (2) everyone should read Judge Davis’ cogent and reasoned dissenting opinion, which hopefully will be followed instead of the majority’s strained application of the “compel” standard.   Judge Davis was right: the evidence does compel a different outcome. Judge Davis does a wonderful job also of distinguishing the prior case law in this area and showing how Mr. Tobora Gutierrez’s case is fundamentally different. As he says, “if the egregious facts of this case are not sufficient to support a finding of public-official acquiescence, CAT relief will be a dead-letter to most if not all individuals who live in countries where the police are corrupt or simply do not have the will or courage to protect them from brutal gang attacks.”

 

Judge Davis is right, this is a most troubling decision but not just for the reason he provides.  It is troubling for the further reason that the majority applies the wrong legal standard here, the “compels” standard versus a de novo review. The majority also leaves the door open for “deferred action,” for this sympathetic and horrendous case, although it declines to recommend it. Most importantly, it also leaves the door open for de novo review, in future cases, at least where those litigants are perceived to have preserved the issue. Litigants can do this by filing a motion to reconsider with the BIA, then filing (another, second) petition for review when the motion to reconsider is denied, and then (following the procedure mandated by section 1252) consolidating the two cases.

 

(Institution for identification only)

Geoffrey Hoffman

Clinical Professor, UHLC Immigration Clinic Director

Let’s not forget that Garland’s DOJ defended this grotesque miscarriage of justice. In a grim way, Geoffrey’s “practical scholarship” ties in nicely with Ruth Marcus’s recent op-ed in WashPost on the righto-wacko 5th Circuit’s dangerous assault on American justice:

Ruth Marcus
Washington Post Columnist Ruth Marcus, moderates a panel discussion about chronic poverty with Education Secretary John B. King (blue tie) and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (striped tie), during the National Association of Counties (NACo), at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park, in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016. U.S. Department of Agriculture photo by Lance Cheung.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/31/5th-circuit-is-staking-out-claim-be-americas-most-dangerous-court/

Opinion: The 5th Circuit is staking out a claim to be America’s most dangerous court

Opinion by Ruth Marcus

August 31 at 6:37 PM ET

The Supreme Court is, no doubt, the nation’s most powerful court. But the 5th Circuit, the federal appeals court that covers Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, is staking out a claim to be the most dangerous — the least wedded to respecting precedent or following an orderly judicial process.

The 5th is arguably the most conservative among the country’s dozen appeals courts. It inclined in that direction even before President Donald Trump managed to install six nominees. And they constitute quite a bunch: Stuart Kyle Duncan, who said the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling establishing a right to same-sex marriage “imperils civic peace” and “raises a question about the legitimacy of the court.” Cory Wilson, who tweeted about Hillary Clinton using the hashtag #CrookedHillary, called the Affordable Care Act “illegitimate” and said he supported overturning Roe v. Wade. James C. Ho, who issued a concurring opinion lamenting the “moral tragedy of abortion.”

How conservative is the court, where 12 of 17 active judges were named by Republican presidents? “As conservative a federal appeals court as any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” says Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, noting that even as the circuit’s conservatives tend toward the extreme end of the spectrum, its liberals aren’t all that liberal.

One measure: During each of the last two Supreme Court terms, with conservative justices firmly in the majority, the high court has reviewed seven cases from the 5th Circuit. It reversed 6 of 7 decisions in the 2019-2020 term and 5 of 7 in 2020-2021.

These included the appeals courts’ rulings striking down the Affordable Care Act and upholding the constitutionality of a Louisiana abortion law, identical to a Texas statute the justices had tossed out several years earlier — another 5th Circuit special reversed by the high court. If you thought the appeals court judges would have learned their lesson the first time, you don’t know the 5th Circuit.

Texas can ban the abortion procedure most commonly used to end second-trimester pregnancies, a federal appeals court ruled on Aug. 18. (Reuters)

The circuit’s latest shenanigans involve, unsurprisingly, abortion, and Texas’s latest attempt to eviscerate abortion rights. This Texas law, which goes into effect Wednesday, is both blatantly unconstitutional (it purports to prohibit abortion once there is a detectable fetal heartbeat, around six weeks into pregnancy) and an audacious effort to evade judicial review (it leaves enforcement of the ban up to private vigilantes, not state officials.)

In this effort to end-run and effectively overturn Roe v. Wade, the 5th Circuit has already proved itself an eager co-conspirator. Texas abortion clinics filed suit in federal court challenging the law and seeking to block it from taking effect. A federal judge had scheduled a hearing on whether to grant such an injunction.

But on Friday a panel of the 5th Circuit — two Trump judges and one Reagan appointee — issued an extraordinary order preventing the district judge from going ahead with the hearing, thus letting the law take effect in the interim — all this even as the appeals court refused to speed up its consideration of the case. In a sign of their desperation, the clinics appealed that action to the Supreme Court, not exactly a friendly venue these days for abortion rights.

. . . .

Read the rest of Ruth’s op-ed at the link.

But, the right-controlled Supremes aren’t going quietly into the night in this competition. The right to a reasoned decision from a fair and impartial decision-maker is fundamental to Constitutional due process — except at the Supremes. The righty majority now employs the “shadow docket” to avoid explanation and accountability for some of it’s most outrageously scofflaw decisions! Many of these have hurt or even killed migrants. David Leonhardt @ NY Times explains:

David Leonhardt

Davide Leonhardt
Journalist
NY Times
PHOTO: Wikipedia

Rulings without explanations

The Supreme Court opinion allowing Texas to ban nearly all abortions was different from most major rulings by the court.
This one came out shortly before midnight on Wednesday. It consisted of a single paragraph, not signed by the justices who voted for it and lacking the usual detailed explanation of their reasoning. And there had been no oral arguments, during which opposing lawyers could have made their cases and answered questions from the justices.
Instead, the opinion was part of something that has become known as “the shadow docket.” In the shadow docket, the court makes decisions quickly, without the usual written briefings, oral arguments or signed opinions. In recent years, the shadow docket has become a much larger part of the Supreme Court’s work.
Shadow-docket rulings have shaped policy on voting rights, climate change, birth control, Covid-19 restrictions and more. Last month, the justices issued shadow decisions forcing the Biden administration to end its eviction moratorium and to reinstate a Trump administration immigration policy. “The cases affect us at least as much as high-profile cases we devote so much attention to,” Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, told me.
Shadow-docket cases are frequently those with urgency — such as a voting case that must be decided in the final weeks before an election. As a result, the justices don’t always have time to solicit briefs, hold oral arguments and spend months grappling with their decision. Doing so can risk irreparable harm to one side in the case.
For these reasons, nobody questions the need for the court to issue some expedited, bare-bones rulings. But many legal experts are worried about how big the shadow docket has grown, including in cases that the Supreme Court could have decided in a more traditional way.
“Shadow docket orders were once a tool the court used to dispense with unremarkable and legally unambiguous matters,” Moira Donegan wrote in The Guardian. “In recent years the court has largely dispensed with any meaningful application of the irreparable harm standard.”
Why the shadow docket has grown
Why have the justices expanded the shadow docket?
In part, it is a response to a newfound willingness by lower courts to issue decisions that apply to the entire country, as my colleague Charlie Savage explains. By acting quickly, the Supreme Court can retain its dominant role.
But there is also a political angle. Shadow-docket cases can let the court act quickly and also shield individual justices from criticism: In the latest abortion case, there is no signed opinion for legal scholars to pick apart, and no single justice is personally associated with the virtual end of legal abortion in Texas. The only reason that the public knows the precise vote — 5 to 4 — is that the four justices in the minority each chose to release a signed dissent.
Critics argue that judges in a democracy owe the public more transparency. “This idea of unexplained, unreasoned court orders seems so contrary to what courts are supposed to be all about,” Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard law professor, has said. “If courts don’t have to defend their decisions, then they’re just acts of will, of power.”
During a House hearing on the shadow docket in February, members of both parties criticized its growth. “Knowing why the justices selected certain cases, how each of them voted, and their reasoning is indispensable to the public’s trust in the court’s integrity,” Representative Henry Johnson Jr., a Georgia Democrat, said. Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, said, “I am a big fan of judges and justices making clear who’s making the decision, and I would welcome reforms that required that.”
The shadow docket also leaves lower-court judges unsure about what exactly the Supreme Court has decided and how to decide similar cases they later hear. “Because the lower-court judges don’t know why the Supreme Court does what it does, they sometimes divide sharply when forced to interpret the court’s nonpronouncements,” writes William Baude, a University of Chicago law professor and former clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts. Baude coined the term “shadow docket.”
Six vs. three
The court’s six Republican-appointed justices are driving the growth of the shadow docket, and it is consistent with their overall approach to the law. They are often (though not always) willing to be aggressive, overturning longstanding precedents, in campaign finance, election law, business regulation and other areas. The shadow docket expands their ability to shape American society.
The three Democratic-appointed justices, for their part, have grown frustrated by the trend. In her dissent this week, Justice Elena Kagan wrote, “The majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this court’s shadow-docket decision making — which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent and impossible to defend.” In an interview with my colleague Adam Liptak last week, Justice Stephen Breyer said: “I can’t say never decide a shadow-docket thing. … But be careful.”
Roberts also evidently disagrees with the use of the shadow docket in the Texas abortion case. In his dissent, joining the three liberal justices, he said the court could instead have blocked the Texas law while it made its way through the courts. That the court chose another path means that abortion is now all but illegal in the nation’s second-largest state.
The justices are likely to settle the question in a more lasting way next year. They will hear oral arguments this fall in a Mississippi abortion case — the more traditional kind, outside the shadows — and a decision is likely by June.

Read more from David in “The Morning” e-mail from the NYT.

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

Abrogating a treaty, intellectual dishonesty, neutering Federal statutes and regulations, scoffing at Constitutional due process, disregarding decency and human life (at least “life after birth”), AND illegally sending another human back to be tortured to death is indeed a “hard act to follow” and makes the 5th a serious contender. But, remember where this “opportunity to dump on migrants” came from!

Immigration practitioners will tell you never to underestimate the sloppiness, lack of expertise, irresponsibility, disdain for due process, and disregard for human lives that has become institutionalized at Garland’s “Miller Lite” captive appeals “court,” the BIA! And, like the Supremes and unlike the 5th Circuit, the BIA has nationwide jurisdiction and sets national precedents. But, unlike the Supremes, who decide fewer than 100 cases in an average year, the BIA assembly line charms out 20,000 to 30,000 cases annually through its defective processes, and it’s lousy, one-sided, anti-immigrant precedents and reactionary guidance that destroy thousands of lives and futures in Immigration Court every day!

So, when it comes to worst court of today, don’t count out the BIA!

As described by Charlotte Klein and former Acting SG Neal Kaytal @ Vanity Fair, the extremist right GOP is now fulfilling it’s long-promised “gruesome blueprint” to overthrow liberal democracy and perpetuate far-right, minority, authoritarian, in many ways neo-Nazi rule in America. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/09/gruesome-blueprint-texas-assault-on-abortion-rights-could-have-snowball-effect

Charlotte Klein
Charlotte Klein
Staff Writer
Vanity Fair
PHOTO: Twitter

The “Commanding Generals” of this effort are unprincipled, far-right GOP jurists. Their initial targeted victims are, of course, the usual vulnerable suspects: migrants, asylum seekers, women, voters of color, transgender kids, the poor, union members, etc. But, eventually, all of us who reman true to liberal democratic values will be targeted for some kind of punishment. Immigration “led the way” in the “Dred Scottfication of the other” by the Supremes at the behest of  the Trump kakistocracy. But, don’t think that’s where this heinous resuscitation of one of the worst cases in American jurisprudence will end!

Meanwhile, this latest phase of the assault has unleashed the usual Dem arsenal of feckless weaponry, including:

  • Statements of outrage untied to realistic possibilities; 
  • Largely meaningless public demonstrations that are “media events” and not much else; 
  • Idle threats of reprisals; 
  • A barrage of op-eds decrying that the fringe radical right and their relatively unpopular agenda has once again outflanked liberals who represent the views and values of the majority;
  • Statements of fact that have no material effect (public support for the complete elimination of abortion, al la Texas, the 5th, and the Supremes holds steady at 8%, while a large majority of Americans favor abortion in some form or another — explain how that has made a difference — also, does anybody really think that these right wingers give a fig that many women will die from illegal abortions and others will be saddled with unwanted children — the only part of human life that creates much compassion or empathy for this righty gang is that which occurs prior to birth);
  • Appeals to precedent, fairness, decency, reasonableness, confirmation promises, and respect for the law addressed to a party and its jurists who value none of these things if they get in the way of their authoritarian agenda.

But, Dems, here’s a better idea! For once, why not try a different approach and actually work within what you DO control and CAN change? Something that will showcase the positive attributes of honest, expert, progressive judging while developing best practices and saving lots of  lives in the process. What do you have to lose, Dems? Can actually doing something to combat right-wing control of the judiciary rather than just impotently raging against it produce a worse result than you have already achieved — even when controlling the Executive, House, and Senate? 

There is not much in the immediate future that Biden and the Dems can (and are willing to) do to change the composition and tenor of the Supremes and the 5th Circuit. But Biden and Garland have complete control over the “Miller Lite” BIA and the Immigration Courts!

A new, well-qualified, BIA comprised of progressive expert judges unswervingly committed to scholarship, quality, due process, respect for migrants and their attorneys, and correct results could (and should) be installed by now. But, disgracefully, it isn’t! Progressives need to hold Biden’s and Garland’s feet to the fire until they create the positive change they promised, but have not delivered!

Then, once a new BIA is in place, go to work on re-competing all Immigration Judge jobs on a merit basis, incorporating key progressive values and real-life experiences, and also involving input from practitioners and outside experts in the area. Create a better progressive Federal Immigration Judiciary and let it lead the way to restoring due process, best practices, efficiency, humanity, fundamental fairness, and integrity to our broken immigration system!

Humanity is suffering! Garland must pull the plug 🔌 on the “BIA Clown Show” 🤡 before it kills ⚰️ anyone else! Pull the BIA from the “Most Dangerous Court In America Competition” before they can “win” it. A “win” for the BIA would certainly be a “loss” for America!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever! Bad Judges, Never!  

PWS

09-03-21

THE “MAINSTREAM MEDIA” HAS FALLEN FOR BILLY BARR’S LATEST “CON JOB” HOOK, LINE & SINKER — But YOU Shouldn’t — Bess Levin @! Vanity Fair Decodes Billy’s Real Message to His Don: “Let [me] turn the judicial branch into your own personal score-settling operation in peace!“  — Plus, My Bonus “Friday Essay” — “Don’t Believe A Word Billy Barr Says!”

Bess Levin
Bess Levin
Politics & Finance Writer
Vanity Fair

 

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/02/william-barr-trump-doj-tweets

Bess writes:

Even before he was hired as Donald Trump’s attorney general, William Barr made it clear that he would be acting as the president’s lackey first and the chief lawyer for the United States second, having auditioned for the role by sending an unsolicited letter to the Justice Department calling the Russia inquiry “fatally misconceived” and describing Robert Mueller’s actions as “grossly irresponsible.” Since then, Barr has told Congress it’s perfectly okay for the president to instruct aides to lie to investigators, suggested that Mueller’s report fully exonerated Trump, which of course it did not, and attempted to bury the “urgent“ whistle-blower report that became the basis of the House’s impeachment proceedings.

Now, if it were up to Barr, he’d happily carry on doing the president’s dirty work, but for one problem: Trump, with his flapping yap and quick trigger finger, has been making it a little too obvious that the DOJ, in its current form, exists to punish his enemies and spare his friends. The most recent example of this, of course, came this week, when the president tweeted, at 1:48 a.m., that the sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years for his longtime pal Roger Stone was “horrible,” “very unfair,” and a “miscarriage of justice.” Then, after Barr’s DOJ intervened with a new filing calling for a much lighter sentence—which prompted the four prosecutors on the case to withdraw from it—the president tweeted his thanks, congratulating the attorney general on getting involved in matters relevant to his personal interests.

For many people long aware of Barr’s status as a boot-licking hack, this was a bridge too far. The calls for him to resign or be impeached were swift. And they got so bad that on Thursday, the attorney general felt compelled to sit down with ABC News and send the message to the president that if he’d like the DOJ to continue to do his dirty work, he needs to stop tweeting about it. Do criminals tell their social-media followers “Check out this sweet scam I just pulled”? No! Of course, rather than stating directly that the president’s penchant for telling the world about the many ways he’s corrupted the government have made it difficult for that corruption to continue, Barr had to pretend his comments were all about ensuring the DOJ’s independence, which would be a funny, not-at-all-believable thing for him to start caring about now.

“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody….whether it’s Congress, newspaper editorial boards, or the president,” Bill Barr tells @ABC News.

“I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.” 

http://

abcn.ws/39yd9bE

 

“I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody,” Barr insisted to ABC News chief justice correspondent Pierre Thomas. “Whether it’s Congress, a newspaper editorial board, or the president. I’m gonna do what I think is right. And you know…I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.” Just in case that extremely obvious hint was lost on its intended audience, Barr added: “I think it’s time to stop the tweeting about Department of Justice criminal cases.”

Maybe it’s not the tweets damaging his integrity but the nakedly partisan and quasi-legal decisions he’s made on the tweeter’s behalf?  Just a thought. 

AG Bill Barr: “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.” He says Trump’s tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job and to assure the courts and the prosecutors in the department that we’re doing our work with integrity.” via @ABC @PierreTABC @alex_mallin

Asked about the decision to reverse the sentencing recommendation for Stone, Barr insisted that it definitely had nothing to do with the guy being a longtime friend of Trump’s, claiming that he came to the unbiased conclusion on his own that the seven-to-nine-years call was excessive and that he was planning to file an update even before Trump tweeted about it being “horrible and unfair.” (He was not asked about the NBC News report that he additionally removed a U.S. attorney from her post for failing to punish Trump’s enemy Andrew McCabe, or that the Justice Department also intervened to change the sentencing recommendation for convicted criminal and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.)

Barr said Trump’s middle-of-the-night tweet put him in a bad position. He insists he had already discussed with staff that the sentencing recommendation was too long. “Do you go forward with what you think is the right decision or do you pull back because of the tweet? And that just sort of illustrates how disruptive these tweets can be,” he said.

Barr also told ABC he was “a little surprised” that the entire Stone prosecution team had resigned from the case—and one from the DOJ entirely—which presumably has something to do with the fact that after using your department to do the president’s bidding for so long, you sometimes forget that other people will take issue with such behavior.

Asked if he expected Trump to react to his criticism of the tweets, Barr responded: “I hope he will react.”

“And respect it?” Thomas asked.

“Yes,” Barr said. You hear that, Mr. President? Let the man turn the judicial branch into your own personal score-settling operation in peace!

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

DON’T BELIEVE A WORD BILLY BARR SAYS!

By Paul Wickham Schmidt

Exclusive for immigrationcourtside.com

Feb. 14, 2020

Even smart folks like The NY Times’ David Leonhardt are babbling about, perhaps, giving Billy “the benefit of the doubt.” Come on, man! 

As Bess Levin points out, Barr’s faithfully been doing Trump’s “dirty work” for him since even before he set foot inside the DOJ again. It’s not like he’s suddenly had a “moral awakening” or discovered human decency. 

No, Trump is the “unitary Executive” that Billy and some of his GOP righty neo-fascists have always salivated over. But, understandably he’d prefer more privacy as he deconstructs the DOJ and undermines fair and impartial justice, including, of course, further trashing the Immigration Courts that, incredible as it might seem in a country that actually has a written Constitution supposedly guaranteeing Due Process to “all persons,” belong exclusively to him. 

Remarkably, and quite stunningly to anyone who has actually studied the law, the Article III Courts, all the way up to the feckless Supremes, have gone along with this absurd charade. You get the message: Immigrants, migrants, and asylum seekers aren’t really “persons” at all. They have been dehumanized by the regime and “Dred Scottified” by the Article IIIs.

There is no particular legal rationale or justification for this ongoing miscarriage of justice. It’s just a matter of enough folks in black robes being too cowardly or self-absorbed, or maybe in a few cases too ignorant, to stand up for the Constitutional and human rights of the most vulnerable among us.

To paraphrase an expression from the world of religion: “What would Jesus think about this blindness to human suffering?” Nothing good, I’m sure!

If he’s actually out there among us today, he’s undoubtedly among those suffering in the regime’s “New American Gulag” or waiting in squalor along the Mexican border for a “fixed hearing” that’s probably never going to happen anyway. I know where he isn’t: among the sign waving crazies shouting hateful slogans glorifying human rights abuses at the “hate fests” z/k/a “Trump rallies!”

In Immigration Court, the conflicts of interest and threats to human decency aren’t just “implied” or “apparent.” They are very real, and they are destroying real human lives, even killing innocent folks, every day. 

And, unlike U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, whose life tenure allows her to “ignore the noise and do what she thinks is right” (as Trump’s GOP toadies love to point out), Immigration Judges are “wholly owned commodities” of Billy and the regime: disposable, subservient, and told to “follow orders.” They can’t even schedule their own cases without political interference, let alone apply the law in a way that conflicts with Billy’s unethical precedents or those entered by his “wholly owned appellate body,” the Board of Immigration Appeals! 

The latter has recently gone out of its way to show total subservience to the regime’s White Nationalist anti-asylum, anti-due-process, anti-immigrant agenda. Indeed, they have even drawn the ire of at least one conservative GOP-appointed Article III Judge by contemptuously disobeying a direct court order in favor of a footnote in a letter from the Attorney General.

This remarkable, yet entirely predictable, event was first highlighted in Courtside.” https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/01/25/contempt-for-courts-7th-cir-blasts-bia-for-misconduct-we-have-never-before-encountered-defiance-of-a-remand-order-and-we-hope-never-to-see-it-again-members-of-the-board-must-count-themse/

It was also the subject of a highly readable analysis by my good friend and NDPA leader Tess Hellgren, at Innovation Law Lab, certainly no stranger to scofflaw behavior by EOIR and “go along to get along” complicity by Article IIIs. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/02/01/tess-hellgren-innovation-law-lab-when-it-comes-to-the-captive-bia-weaponized-immigration-courts-the-article-iiis-need-to-put-away-the-rubber-stamp-restore-integrity-to-the-law-fac/

More recently, EOIR’s trashing of judicial norms under Billy Barr has been highlighted in another fine article in CNN by Professor Kimberly Wehle, herself a former DOJ prosecutor.https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/02/12/a-conservative-judge-draws-a-line-in-the-sand-with-trump-administration-114185

“Shocking” as this professional malpractice and contempt for the justice system might be to those journalists and former DOJ employees who haven’t been paying attention, it’s nothing new to those of us involved in immigration. For the last three years, the regime has been actively and unethically “gaming” the unconstitutional Immigration “Court” system against the very migrants and asylum seekers whose legal rights and human dignity they are actually supposed to be protecting!  How is this “just OK?”

Feckless Article III Courts have largely “gone along to get along,” although they might be showing less patience now that the scofflaw actions and disrespectful attitudes promoted by Billy and his predecessor “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions are directed at them personally rather than just screwing vulnerable migrants and asylum seekers.  

While it’s nice that at least some Article III Judges are finally reacting to being “given the finger” by Barr, Trump, and their gang of White Nationalist thugs, outrage at their own disrespectful treatment pales in comparison with the death, torture, rape, extortion, and the other parade of horribles being inflicted daily on vulnerable migrants by the Immigration “Courts” and the human rights criminals in the Trump regime while the Article IIIs fail to step in and save lives. 

In the end of the day, as history will eventually show, human lives, which are the key to the “rule of law,” will prove to be more important than “hurt feelings” among the Article III “lifers” or the kind of legal gobbledygook (much of it on “jurisdiction” which often translates into “task avoidance”) that Article IIIs, particularly those from the right wing, like to throw around to obscure their legal tone-deafness and moral failings from their fellow humans.

Due Process Forever; Complicity in the Face of Tyranny Never!

 

PWS

02-14-20

BILL BARR – Unqualified For Office – Unfit To Act In A Quasi-Judicial Capacity

BILL BARR – Unqualified For Office – Unfit To Act In A Quasi-Judicial Capacity

There have been many articles pointing out that Bill Barr unethically has acted as Trump’s defense counsel rather than fulfilled his oath to uphold the Constitution and be the Attorney General of all of the American people. There have also been some absurdist “apologias” for Barr some written by once-respected lawyers who should know better, and others written by the normal Trump hacks.

Here are my choices for four of the best articles explaining why Barr should not be the Attorney General. It goes without saying that he shouldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be running the Immigration Court system. His intervention into individual cases in a quasi-judicial capacity is a clear violation of judicial ethics requiring avoidance of even the “appearance” of a conflict of interest. There is no “appearance” here. Barr has a clear conflict in any matter dealing with immigration.

 

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/impeach-attorney-general-william-barr.html

Congress Should Impeach William Barr

Attorney General William Barr. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

House Democrats are going to face a difficult decision about launching an impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Balanced against the president’s impressive array of misconduct is the fact that several more criminal investigations that may add to the indictment are already underway, and that impeaching the president might jeopardize the reelection of red-state Democratic members. But in the meantime, Attorney General William Barr presents them with a much easier decision. Barr has so thoroughly betrayed the values of his office that voting to impeach and remove him is almost obvious.

On March 24, Barr released a short letter summarizing the main findings of the Mueller investigation, as he saw them. News accounts treated Barr’s interpretation as definitive, and the media — even outlets that had spent two years uncovering a wide swath of suspicious and compromising links between the Trump campaign and Russia — dutifully engaged in self-flagellation for having had the temerity to raise questions about the whole affair.

Barr had done very little to that point to earn such a broad benefit of the doubt. In the same role in 1992, he had supported mass pardons of senior officials that enabled a cover-up of the Iran–Contra scandal. Less famously, in 1989 he issued a redacted version of a highly controversial administration legal opinion that, as Ryan Goodman explained, “omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion” for “no justifiable reason.”

And while many members of the old Republican political Establishment had recoiled against Trump’s contempt for the rule of law, Barr has shown no signs of having joined them. He met with Trump to discuss serving as his defense lawyer, publicly attacked the Mueller investigation (which risked “taking on the look of an entirely political operation to overthrow the president”), called for more investigations of Hillary Clinton, and circulated a lengthy memo strongly defending Trump against obstruction charges.

The events since Barr’s letter have incinerated whatever remains of his credibility. The famously tight-lipped Mueller team told several news outlets the letter had minimized Trump’s culpability; Barr gave congressional testimony hyping up Trump’s charges of “spying,” even prejudging the outcome of an investigation (“I think there was a failure among a group of leaders [at the FBI] at the upper echelon”); evaded questions as to whether he had shared the Mueller report with the White House; and, it turns out, he’s “had numerous conversations with White House lawyers which aided the president’s legal team,” the New York Times reports. Then he broke precedent by scheduling a press conference to spin the report in advance of its redacted publication.

It is not much of a mystery to determine which officials have offered their full loyalty to the president. Trump has reportedly “praised Barr privately for his handling of the report and compared him favorably to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions” —whose sole offense in Trump’s eyes was following Department of Justice ethical protocol. Trump urged his Twitter followers to tune in to Barr’s conference, promotional treatment he normally reserves for his Fox News sycophants.

The press conference was the final disqualifying performance. Barr acted like Trump’s defense lawyer, the job he had initially sought, rather than as an attorney general. His aggressive spin seemed designed to work in the maximal number of repetitions of the “no collusion” mantra, in accordance with his boss’s talking points, at the expense of any faithful transmission of the special counsel’s report.

Barr’s letter had made it sound as though Trump’s campaign spurned Russia’s offers of help: “The Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign,” he wrote. In fact, Mueller’s report concluded, “In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer,” but that the cooperation fell short of criminal conduct.

Where Mueller intended to leave the job of judging Trump’s obstructive conduct to Congress, Barr interposed his own judgment. Barr offered this incredible statement for why Trump’s behavior was excusable: “[T]here is substantial evidence to show that the President was frustrated and angered by a sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency, propelled by his political opponents, and fueled by illegal leaks,” Barr said. “Nonetheless, the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel’s investigation,” and credited him further with taking “no act that in fact deprived the Special Counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.”

Sincere? How can Barr use that word to describe the mentality of a man whose own staffers routinely describe him in the media as a pathological liar? Trump repeatedly lied about Russia’s involvement in the campaign, and his own dealings with Russia. And he also, contra Barr, repeatedly denied the special counsel access to witnesses by dangling pardons to persuade them to withhold cooperation.

It is true that many of Trump’s attempts to obstruct justice failed. As Mueller wrote, the president’s “efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests.”

This is a rather different gloss on the facts than the happy story Barr offered the press. What’s more, it is a pressing argument for Barr’s own removal. Next to the president himself, the attorney general is the most crucial actor in the safeguarding of the rule of law. The Justice Department is an awesome force that holds the power to enable the ruling party to commit crimes with impunity, or to intimidate and smear the opposing party with the taint of criminality.

There is no other department in government in which mere norms, not laws, are all that stand between democracy as we know it and a banana republic. Barr has revealed his complete unfitness for this awesome task. Nearly two more years of this Trumpian henchman wielding power over federal law enforcement is more weight than the rickety Constitution can bear.

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

Dvid Leonhardt of the NY Times writes:

In the years after Watergate, Justice Department officials — from both parties — worked hard to banish partisan cronyism from the department. Their goal was to make it the least political, most independent part of the executive branch.

“Our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” Edward Levi, Gerald Ford’s attorney general, said at the time. Griffin Bell, later appointed to the same job by Jimmy Carter, described the department as “a neutral zone in the government, because the law has to be neutral.”

Attorney General William Barr clearly rejects this principle. He’s repeatedly put a higher priority on protecting his boss, President Trump, than on upholding the law in a neutral way. He did so in his letter last month summarizing Robert Mueller’s investigation and then again in a bizarre prebuttal news conference yesterday. As The Times editorial board wrote, Barr yesterday “behaved more like the president’s defense attorney than the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.”

Throughout his tenure, Barr has downplayed or ignored the voluminous evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing — his lies to the American people, his willingness to work with a hostile foreign country during a presidenial campaign, his tolerance of extensive criminal behavior among his staff and his repeated efforts to obstruct an investigation. Barr even claimed that Trump “fully cooperated” with that investigation, which Vox’s Ezra Klein notes is “an outright lie.”

Since he took office, Trump has made clear that he wants an attorney general who acts as first an enforcer of raw power and only second as an enforcer of federal law. In Barr, Trump has found his man. Together, they have cast aside more than four decades worth of Justice Department ideals and instead adopted the approach of Richard Nixon.

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

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/william-barr-misled-public-mueller-report_n_5cb8b2b0e4b032e7ceb60d05

The Ways William Barr Misled The Public About The Mueller Report

Instead of just releasing the special counsel’s findings, the U.S. attorney general spun the report to the benefit of President Trump.
Letting this farce of a “judicial system” continue unfairly endangering individual lives and deferring to officials who are neither subject matter experts nor fair and impartial quasi-judicial decision makers is unconstitutional. By letting it continue, life-tenured Federal Judges both tarnish their reputations and fail to fulfill their oaths of office.
As a young attorney in the Department of Justice during the Watergate Era, I, along with many others, were indelibly impressed and inspired when then Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his Deputy William Ruckelshaus resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s illegal order to fire the Watergate Special Prosecutor (a/k/a/ “The Saturday Night Massacre”). Obviously, Barr has dragged the Department and its reputation down to new depths — back to the days of Nixon and disgraced (and convicted) Attorney General “John the Con” Mitchell, who actually planned criminal conspiracies in his fifth floor office at the DOJ.
Obviously, there are systemic problems that have allowed unqualified individuals like Barr and Sessions to serve in and co-opt the system of justice, and denigrate the Department of Justice. (I spoke to some recently retired DOJ officials who characterized the morale among career professionals at the DOJ as “below the floor”). Some of those can be traced to the lack of backbone and integrity in the “Trump GOP” which controls the Senate and refuses to enforce even minimal standards of professionalism, meaningful oversight, and independent decision making in Trump appointees. That’s what a “kakistocracy” is. It’s up to the rest of us to do what is necessary under the law to replace the kakistocracy with a functioning democracy.
PWS
04-20-19

ADMINISTRATION’S WHITE NATIONALIST SCOFFLAW AGENDA THWARTED AGAIN – Federal Judge Exposes Lies & Cynicism In Trump Officials’ Attempt To Suppress Hispanic Response To Census!

David Leonhardt in the NY Times:

White nationalism lost in federal court yesterday.

Judge Jesse Furman blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to add a question to the 2020 census asking about citizenship status. Furman “found that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated federal law by misleading the public — and his own department — about the reasons for adding the question,” Dara Lind of Vox writes.

Ross claimed, laughably, that the citizenship question would help the Trump administration enforce voting rights. In truth, it was designed to intimidate Latinos — both legal and illegal — into not responding to the census. The resulting undercount would then reduce the political representation of immigrant-heavy regions and cause them to receive less federal funding.

The citizenship question, Paul Waldman writes in The Washington Post, is part of “a broader effort on the part of Republicans to put a thumb on the electoral scale in every way they possibly can, whether it’s extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression efforts targeted at minorities, or the use of the census to make Republican victories just that much more likely.”

Yesterday’s ruling isn’t the final word. The Trump administration will likely appeal, and the appeal will likely reach the Supreme Court, where Republican-appointed justices hold a five-to-four majority.

But there is some reason to hope the justices will avoid an obviously partisan decision. Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the two newest conservative justices, have previously taken a dim view of federal officials who exceed limits on their power, The Daily Beast’s Jay Michaelson explains. “While it’s always possible that the Court’s conservatives will vote ideology over principle … their particular judicial philosophies do not bode well for the Trump administration’s brazen defiance of administrative law,” Michaelson writes.

A side note: Given the combination of his census exploits, his lies about those exploits and his shady stock trades, Ross may now deserve consideration if my colleague Gail Collins revisits her analysis of the worst Trump Cabinet member. His case is helped by the fact that some of his even more corrupt colleagues have recently departed the administration.

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

Seems to me that the Government attorneys representing liars like Ross and his dishonest positions in court are violating ethical rules. Why would a case like this be on the way to the Supremes, rather than Ross being on his way to jail for conspiring to violate civl rights? And, as Leonhardt points out, some of his departed Cabinet colleagues were even more corrupt and dishonest.

PWS

01-16-19

DAVID LEONHARDT @ NYT ON THE MOLLIE TIBBETTS CASE AND RACISM

David Leonhardt

Op-Ed Columnist

The main reason that Mollie Tibbetts’s horrible killing has received so much attention is racism. Tibbetts’s accused murderer is a Mexican immigrant, and large segments of the conservative media, including talk radio and Fox News, like to call attention to crimes committed by people with dark skin. It’s silly to pretend otherwise.
You’ll notice the pattern if you spend any time watching or listening to these media sources. The pattern becomes especially clear when they descend into falsehoods.
Just look at the made-up story that Fox promoted last week about land seizures in South Africa, which led to a false tweet from President Trump about “the large-scale killing of farmers.” Or look at Lou Dobbs’s long history of telling on-air lies about immigrants (despite their comparatively low crime rates). Dobbs, other right-wing hosts and Trump have no such history of making up stories about crimes committed by white people.
I don’t think it’s possible to have an honest conversation about the Tibbetts debate without acknowledging the role that race plays. But I also think that David A. French’s piece in National Review is worth reading, especially for progressives.
French starts the piece by acknowledging the role of racism. That’s not his focus, though. His goal, instead, is to persuade readers that race is not the sole reason that the Tibbetts case resonates with so many people.
“There are reasons why illegal-immigrant crime can carry a poignant punch among people of good will,” French writes. “The murderer wasn’t supposed to be here. I’m reminded of the pain that people feel when, for example, they find out (in different crimes) that the police didn’t follow up on a lead or a prisoner was wrongly released on parole. The feeling is palpable.”
Imagine, for example, that you heard the killer in a mass shooting had been able to purchase a gun illegally, because of a failure in the background-check system. Wouldn’t that heighten your sense of injustice about the crime? For most of us, the answer is yes. “The official failure magnifies the personal injustice,” as French argues.
We live in a society that is supposed to be governed by laws. When they are not followed or enforced, many people are bothered. And they are right to be. Society functions better when its rules mean something.
I’m outraged by the racism that the many immigrants face, by the lies told about them and by the abuses that the Trump administration is committing against them. None of it is defensible, whether the immigrants arrived here legally or illegally.
But once the disaster of the Trump presidency has passed, the United States really should rewrite its immigration laws with the goal of reducing illegal immigration (as Barack Obama and John McCain, among many other politicians, have advocated over the years). Toothless laws undermine people’s faith in their government — and create all kinds of kindling for mistrust and anger.
On the same subject: Tibbetts’s relative, Sandi Tibbetts Murphy, wrote a moving denunciation of racism in a recent Facebook post. And several writers, including Rachael Revesz in The Independent and Amanda Marcotte in Salon, noted that gender is a far more important part of the story than immigration.

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

Good to have Leonhardt back again! He actually presents a fairly sane “center left” view of the world. While he was on vacation, in an attempt to expose us sheltered  NYT readers to the “world of the right” one of his “fill-ins” was the shameless Trump apologist Christopher Buskirk. While Leonhardt declared the “great experiment in  broadening horizons” a smashing success, I beg to differ.

For about a week, Buskirk regaled us with condescending essays about why everybody in America should get with the program and warm up to the great benefits of having a racist, White Supremacist, xenophobic, chronic liar, ignorant, bullying, authoritarian, immoral, incompetent, climate change denying, crook, who was elected by a minority of voters, as President. The low point was his totally offensive attempt to exploit the Tibbetts tragedy by spewing the exact racist restrictionist nonsense that Leonhardt exposes and critiques.

To be honest, I know what drives Trump voters. While I would welcome them to the side of the “good guys,” and I certainly think that their genuine problems and issues should be addressed under “good government,” I don’t have too much hope that anybody who still supports Trump is “reachable.”

So, the real task isn’t to understand what weird or perverse things go in the minds of Trump’s hard-core “base.” No, it’s to get the majority of folks who don’t support Trump and his vision of a White Nationalist authoritarian kleptocracy to the polls to throw him and his enablers out before it’s too late for all of us (including his tone-deaf supporters — sometimes you have to have folks from themselves, even if they don’t want to be saved). Arrogant, disingenuous, pseudo-intellectuals like Buskirk are part of the problem, not the solution.

Moving on, I think that Mollie Tibbetts was an amazing person with so very much to offer the world. Her death is a horrible tragedy for her family and the rest of us. I deeply admire and am grateful for the way in which her father and the rest of her family have honored her kind, generous, and loving spirit by resisting the attempts of the racist right to make her a “cause celeb” for hatred and racial bigotry.

I agree with Leonhardt that we all would be better off if we solved the issues surrounding undocumented immigration. The answer is actually fairly straightforward: more properly screened legal immigrants to meet the realistic market needs of American employers and to satisfy our legal obligations to those who are persecuted. That would reduce undocumented immigration and allow DHS to concentrate on real criminals and those who come outside the more generous system. That’s likely to be a much lesser number than we have now.

Still, no system is capable of screening out all of those who might prove to be “bad actors” in the future, particularly where there is no past record of problems to go upon. However, to continue or “double down on” our current, overly restrictive, system is merely to guarantee that more and more individuals will be in the United States without the proper pre-screening and identification necessary to run an orderly system. America was built by immigrants (that’s all of us, except Native Americans), prospered because of them, and still needs them in large numbers to move forward into the future. That’s why the White Nationalist restrictionist proposals being pushed by Trump and his cohorts are not only stupid and immoral, but are ultimately doomed to failure.

PWS

08-29-18

 

DAVID LEONHARDT @ NYT: FROM FORD TO NOW – HOW THE CONCEPT OF “NEUTRAL JUSTICE” & THE AGs WHO BELIEVED IT DISAPPEARED FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE WITHOUT A TRACE! – Today’s DOJ Offers A “Disingenuous Charade” Of “Equal Justice For All!” — “It undermines the idea of equal justice. It tells Americans that our legal system is merely another instrument of partisan battle, that our prosecutors and law-enforcement officers are political hacks in disguise.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/29/opinion/the-sense-of-justice-that-were-losing.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

Leonhardt writes:

Edward Levi and Griffin Bell were very different men. One was the son and grandson of rabbis, a legal scholar whose life revolved around the University of Chicago. The other was a country lawyer who became a master operator in the Atlanta legal world. One was appointed to high office by a Republican president, the other by a Democrat.

Yet for all their differences, Levi and Bell came to share a mission. Together, they created the modern Department of Justice and, more important, the modern American idea of the rule of law.

They were the first two attorneys general appointed after Watergate — Levi by Gerald Ford and Bell by his fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter. And they both set out to refashion the Justice Department into the least political, most independent part of the executive branch. “Our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose,” Levi said. It cannot become “anyone’s weapon.” Bell described the department as “a neutral zone in the government, because the law has to be neutral.”

They understood Richard Nixon’s deepest sins: He saw the law as an instrument not of justice but power. Yet Levi and Bell also knew that Nixon hadn’t been the only problem. Other administrations had also misused the law — investigating enemies and rivals, like civil-rights leaders. So Levi and Bell made sure that the crisis of Watergate didn’t go to waste.

They changed the rules for F.B.I. investigations. They put in place strict protocols for communication between the White House and Justice Department. They made clear — with support from Ford and Carter — that the president must have a unique relationship with the Justice Department.

“It’s perfectly natural and fine for the president and others at the White House to have interactions with the Justice Department on broad policy issues,” Sally Yates, the former deputy attorney general, told me last week. “What’s not O.K. is for the White House, and especially the president, to have any involvement with criminal prosecutions. That really turns the rule of law on its head.”

No administration has been perfect in the pursuit of neutral justice, but every one from Ford’s through Barack Obama’s stayed true to the post-Watergate overhaul. They allowed uncomfortable investigations to proceed unimpeded. They did not treat the law as a weapon.

Then came President Trump.

The story of Levi and Bell highlights how fragile the rule of law is. Much of it does not depend on the Constitution or legislation. It depends on political culture and habits. And that culture and those habits can change. In the sweep of history, the reforms of Levi and Bell are still quite young.

The most obvious ways that Trump is undermining the law involve the Russia investigation. Like Nixon, Trump is enraged that anyone in his administration would investigate anyone else in it. But Russia is only one part of the problem: Trump really does view the law as a weapon, to protect his allies and strike his enemies.

The incomplete list includes: He suggested an end to the prosecution of someone he likes (Joe Arpaio) and the start of prosecutions of people he hates (Hillary Clinton, James Comey). Trump defended his personal lawyer by claiming that the government regularly fabricates evidence. Trump has dragged federal prosecutors into politics, bringing one of them — John Huber, Utah’s top federal prosecutor — to the White House to give a speech lobbying for new immigration laws.

Other presidents did none of this. It undermines the idea of equal justice. It tells Americans that our legal system is merely another instrument of partisan battle, that our prosecutors and law-enforcement officers are political hacks in disguise.

The Trump attacks on the justice system demand a stronger response. The media can’t become numb. His aides and appointees need to stand up to him more often — rather than, for example, assenting to a baseless new inquiry into Clinton, overseen by none other than Huber.

And other Republicans, in Congress and private life, should summon more courage. “We don’t see senior Republican officials, either current or past, defending the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.,” John Bellinger III, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration, said last week at a Georgetown University conference on democratic norms. “It’s just inexplicable.”

Where are the Republican defenders of law and order? Where are you, John Ashcroft? What about C. Boyden Gray, Larry Thompson, Paul Clement, Ted Olson, Susan Collins and Ben Sasse? At least a few of them should be willing to take a little heat in defense of the American system of justice.

In retrospect, Levi almost seemed to be pleading with them in his 1977 goodbye speech as attorney general: “We have shown that the administration of justice can be fair, can be effective, can be nonpartisan. These are goals which can never be won for all time. They must always be won anew.”

You can join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook. I am also writing a daily email newsletter and invite you to subscribe.

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

Yup! And, in some cases, the disguise is pretty transparent — perhaps the only “transparency” in today’s DOJ.

This time period comes close to spanning my career in the DOJ. I worked for both Attorney General Ed Levi and Attorney General Griffin Bell (“known on the “5th Floor” of the DOJ as “Judge Bell”).

I don’t have a recollection of personally meeting Attorney General Levi. However, I did have a strong impression of his integrity because he disqualified himself from a key BIA disbarment case being then being written by my office mate Lauri Steven Filppu who later served with me as an Appellate Judge at the BIA.

The case was Matter of Koden, 15 I&N Dec. 739 (BIA 1974; A.G., BIA 1976), aff’d , 564 F.2d 228 (7th Cir. 1977). The conflict apparently involved the fact that Levi’s wife served on the board of  a charitable organization in Chicago where Koden had worked as an attorney.

Compare that with Jeff Sessions who continues to interfere in BIA cases by certification notwithstanding the obvious conflict of interest and ethically required disqualification stemming from his many pejorative (often untrue and/or distorted) statements about migrants exercising their legal rights, particularly asylum seekers.

I knew Judge Bell better. As INS Deputy General Counsel I accompanied my then boss General Counsel (now Judge) David Crosland to a number of meetings in Bell’s office. I believe that our response to the Iranian Hostage situation was the main topic. I remember him as having a very pronounced Southern accent and being just what I expected of a former judge — concerned with the fair enforcement of the law.

Those days are long gone. The DOJ now appears to have reverted to what it was in the Nixon Administration, when Attorney General John Mitchell actually plotted Federal Crimes from his office.

PWS

04-30-18

 

DAVID LEONHARDT @ NYT — GOP SCOFFLAWS TRUMP & SESSIONS HAVE WORKED HARD TO DESTROY JUSTICE AT THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE – But, The Law Might Yet Rise Up To Bite Both Of Them!

Leonhardt writes in the NY Times:

 

There are a good number of lawyers who don’t love their jobs. Sure, the pay is often good. But the hours can be long and the work narrow, leaving many people without much sense of a mission.

The lawyers who work for the Department of Justice, however, tend to feel quite differently about their work.

I’ve known and interviewed many over the years, and they have some of the highest job satisfaction of any group of people I can think of. “You get to do good for a living, and in the name of your country,” as James Comey said in a 2005 speech to Justice Department employees (the same speech I highlighted in my column earlier this week). “If that doesn’t motivate you to work hard, nothing will.”

To many Justice Department lawyers, doing good means pursuing equality under the law. They see themselves as representing some of the highest American ideals: Every citizen deserves the protection of the law, and no citizen is above the law.

Donald Trump does not share the view that the United States has a fundamental set of rules that apply alike to rich and poor, powerful and powerless. “Trump isn’t someone who played close to the line a time or two, or once did a shady deal. He may well be the single most corrupt major business figure in the United States of America,” The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman wrote yesterday. Waldman then listed Trump’s scams: Trump University, bankrupt casinos, illegal labor, stiffed vendors and on and on and on.

He has often figured out how to stop shy of outright illegality or, in other cases, to violate the law in ways that bring only minor sanctions. He has rarely faced big consequences for his misbehavior. But Trump now finds himself in a very different situation.

The scale of the misbehavior by him and his associates appears to be large. It occurred on perhaps the biggest national stage of all, in a presidential campaign. And dozens of talented, committed Justice Department officials have the assignment of figuring out what he actually did. Thank goodness for them and for the work they are doing.

“Mr. Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks,” The Times editorial board writes. “He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado.”

But, as the headline of that piece bluntly puts it: “The law is coming, Mr. Trump.”

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

It’s certainly ironic that Trump and Sessions no longer get along. They are both totally corrupt and dishonest in their own unique ways. Each is a fraud in his own right. And their shared dedication to intellectual dishonesty, bullying, racism, White Nationalism, xenophobia, divisiveness, skewed justice, and every horrible aspect of America’s past certainly should be a uniting factor.

It would be nice to think that the justice system and Justice Department that they abuse every day in office will get the last laugh and eventually sack them up.  But, it’s by no means certain that justice will be done here. On the other hand, it’s highly unlikely that Trump, Sessions, or today’s GOP will escape the judgement of history for their misdeeds and the damage they are intentionally inflicting upon our country every day that they are allowed to remain in the offices for which they are so supremely unqualified.

PWS

04-12-18

MLK DAY 2018 — DR. KING’S DREAM OF AN AMERICA CELEBRATING EQUALITY & RACIAL HARMONY IS UNDER VICIOUS ATTACK BY TRUMP, PENCE, SESSIONS, AND A HOST OF OTHERS IN TODAY’S WHITE NATIONALIST ENABLING GOP — Who Is Going To Fight To Reclaim The Dream, & Who Is Going To “Go Along To Get Along” With The 21st Century Version Of Jim Crow?

Folks, as we take a few minutes today to remember Dr. King, his vision for a better America, and his inspiring “I Have A Dream Speech,” we have to face the fact that everything Dr. King stood for is under a vicious and concerted attack, the likes of which we haven’t seen in America for approximately 50 years, by individuals elected to govern by a minority of voters in our country.

So, today, I’m offering you a “potpourri”  of how and why Dr.King’s Dream has “gone south,” so to speak, and how those of us who care about social justice and due process in America can nevertheless resurrect it and move forward together for a greater and more tolerant American that celebrates the talents, contributions, and humanity of all who live here!.

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

From the LA Times Editorial Board:

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=186bb118-702e-49a2-a52d-b8dac8aa0cc8

“50 years on, what would King think?

On Martin Luther King’s birthday, a look back at some disquieting events in race relations in 2017.

Nearly 50 years ago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. went to the mountaintop and looked out over the promised land. In a powerful and prophetic speech on April 3, 1968, he told a crowd at the Mason Temple in Memphis that while there would certainly be difficult days ahead, he had no doubt that the struggle for racial justice would be successful.

“I may not get there with you,” he said. “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And so I am happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything.”

The following day, he was assassinated.

The intervening years have been full of steps forward and steps backward, of extraordinary changes as well as awful reminders of what has not changed. What would King have made of our first black president? What would he have thought had he seen neo-Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Va., so many years after his death? How would he have viewed the shooting by police of unarmed black men in cities around the country — or the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement? He would surely have heard the assertions that we have become a “post-racial” society because we elected (and reelected) Barack Obama. But would he have believed it?

This past year was not terribly heartening on the civil rights front. It was appalling enough that racist white nationalists marched in Charlottesville in August. But it was even more shocking that President Trump seemed incapable of making the most basic moral judgment about that march; instead, he said that there were some “very fine people” at the rally of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Racial injustices that bedeviled the country in King’s day — voter suppression, segregated schools, hate crimes — have not gone away. A report released last week by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on inequities in the funding of public schools concludes — and this should surprise no one — that students of color living in poor, segregated neighborhoods are often relegated to low-quality schools simply due to where they live. States continued in 2017 to pass laws that make it harder, rather than easier, for people of color to vote.

The Trump administration also seems determined to undo two decades of Justice Department civil rights work, cutting back on investigations into the excessive use of force and racial bias by police departments. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions in March ordered a review of all existing federal consent decrees with local police departments with the possibility of dismantling them — a move that could set back police reform by many years.

Here in Los Angeles County, this statistic is telling: 40% of the estimated 57,000 homeless people — the most desperate and destitute residents of the county — are black. Yet black residents make up only 9% of the L.A. County population.

But despite bad news on several fronts, what have been heartening over the last year are the objections raised by so many people across the country.

Consider the statues of Confederate generals and slave owners that were brought down across the country. Schools and other institutions rebranded buildings that were formerly named after racists.

The Black Lives Matter movement has grown from a small street and cyber-protest group into a more potent civil rights organization focusing on changing institutions that have traditionally marginalized black people.

When football quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to protest, as he said, a country that oppresses black people, he was denounced by many (including Trump) but emulated by others. Kaepernick has been effectively banished from professional football but he started a movement.

Roy Moore was defeated for a Senate seat in Alabama by a surge of black voters, particularly black women. (But no sooner did he lose than Joe Arpaio — the disgraced, vehemently anti-immigrant former Arizona sheriff — announced that he is running for Senate there.)

So on what would have been King’s 89th birthday, it is clear that the United States is not yet the promised land he envisioned in the last great speech of his life. But we agree with him that it’s still possible to get there.”

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

See this short HuffPost video on “Why MLK’s Message Still Matters Today!”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/martin-luther-king-jr-assassination-legacy_us_58e3ea89e4b03a26a366dd77

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

Read about how the Arizona GOP has resurrected, and in some instances actually welcomed, “Racist Joe” Arpaio, an unapologetic anti-Hispanic bigot and convicted scofflaw. “Racist Joe” was pardoned by Trump and is now running for the GOP nomination to replace retiring Arizona GOP Senator Jeff Flake, who often has been a critic of Trump. One thing “Racist Joe’s” candidacy is doing is energizing the Latino community that successfully fought to remove him from the office of Sheriff and to have him brought to justice for his racist policies. 

Kurtis Lee reports for the LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-pol-arpaio-latino-voters-20180114-story.html

“Yenni Sanchez had thought her work was finished.

Spared from the threat of deportation by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, she campaigned to oust Joe Arpaio when he unsuccessfully ran for reelection as Maricopa County sheriff in 2016. She knocked on hundreds of doors in south Phoenix’s predominantly Latino neighborhoods to register voters. She made phone calls, walked on college campuses. Her message was direct, like the name of the group she worked with, Bazta Arpaio, a take on the Spanish word basta — enough Arpaio.

But now, the 85-year-old former sheriff is back and running for Senate. Sanchez, who had planned to step away from politics to focus on her studies at Grand Canyon University, is back as well, organizing once more.

“If he thinks he can come back and terrorize the entire state like he did Maricopa County, it’s not going to happen,” Sanchez, 20, said. “I’m not going to let it happen.”

Arpaio enters a crowded Republican primary and may not emerge as the party’s nominee, but his bid has already galvanized Arizona’s Latino electorate — one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing voter blocs.

Organizers like Sanchez, who thought they might sit out the midterm elections, rushed back into offices and started making calls. Social media groups that had gone dormant have resurrected with posts reminding voters that Arpaio was criminally convicted of violating a federal court order to stop racially profiling Latinos.

“We’ve been hearing, ‘Is it true Arpaio is back? OK, what can we do to help?’” said Montserrat Arredondo, director of One Arizona, a Phoenix nonprofit group focused on increasing Latino voter turnout. “People were living in terror when Arpaio was in office. They haven’t forgotten.”

In 2008, 796,000 Latinos were eligible to vote in the state, according to One Arizona. By 2016, that potential voting pool jumped to 1.1 million. (California tops the nation with the most Latinos eligible to vote, almost 6.9 million.)

In 2016, Latinos accounted for almost 20% of all registered voters in Arizona. Latinos make up about 30% of Arizona’s population.

. . . .

Last year, President Trump pardoned Arpaio of a criminal conviction for violating a federal court order to stop racially profiling Latinos. When announcing his candidacy Tuesday, Arpaio pledged his full support to the president and his policies.

On Saturday, Arpaio made his first public appearance since announcing his candidacy, attending a gathering of Maricopa County Republicans. He was unmoved when asked about the enthusiasm his candidacy has created among Latinos.

“Many of them hate me for enforcing the law,” he said. “I can’t change that. … All I know is that I have my supporters, they’re going to support who they want. I’m in this to win it though.”

Arpaio, gripping about a dozen red cardboard signs that read “We need Sheriff Joe Arpaio in DC,” walked through the crowd where he mingled with, among others, former state Sen. Kelli Ward and U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, who also are seeking the GOP Senate nomination. Overall, Arpaio was widely met with enthusiasm from attendees.

“So glad you’re back,” said a man wearing a “Vietnam Veteran” hat.

“It’s great to be back,” Arpaio replied.

Arpaio, who handed out business cards touting his once self-proclaimed status as “America’s toughest sheriff,” said he had no regrets from his more than two decades in office.

“Not a single one,” he said. “I spoke my mind and did what needed to be done and would do it the same in a minute.”

In an interview, Arpaio, who still insists he has “evidence” that former President Obama’s birth certificate is forged, a rumor repeatedly shown to be false, did not lay out specific policy platforms, only insisting he’ll get things done in Washington.

During his tenure as sheriff, repeated court rulings against his office for civil rights violations cost local taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.”

Read the complete story at the link.

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

Professor George Yancy of Emory University writing in the NY Times asks “Will America Choose King’s Dream Or Trump’s Nightmare?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/opinion/martin-luther-king-trump-racism.html

Yancy writes:

“Let’s come clean: President Trump is a white racist! Over the past few days, many have written, spoken and shouted this fact, but it needs repeating: President Trump is a white racist! Why repeat it? Because many have been under the grand illusion that America is a “post-racial” nation, a beautiful melting pot where racism is only sporadic, infrequent and expressed by those on the margins of an otherwise mainstream and “decent” America. That’s a lie; a blatant one at that. We must face a very horrible truth. And America is so cowardly when it comes to facing awful truths about itself.

So, as we celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we must face the fact that we are at a moral crossroad. Will America courageously live out Dr. King’s dream or will it go down the road of bigotry and racist vitriol, preferring to live out Mr. Trump’s nightmare instead? In his autobiography, reflecting on the nonviolent uprising of the people of India, Dr. King wrote, “The way of acquiesce leads to moral and spiritual suicide.” Those of us who defiantly desire to live, and to live out Dr. King’s dream, to make it a reality, must not acquiesce now, precisely when his direst prophetic warning faces us head on.

On the night before he was murdered by a white man on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., Dr. King wrote: “America is going to hell if we don’t use her vast resources to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life.” Our current president, full of hatred and contempt for those children, is the terrifying embodiment of this prophecy.

We desperately need each other at this moment of moral crisis and malicious racist divisiveness. Will we raise our collective voices against Mr. Trump’s white racism and those who make excuses for it or submit and thereby self-destructively kill any chance of fully becoming our better selves? Dr. King also warned us that “there comes a time when silence is betrayal.” To honor Dr. King, we must not remain silent, we must not betray his legacy.

So many Americans suffer from the obsessive need to claim “innocence,” that is, to lie to ourselves. Yet such a lie is part of our moral undoing. While many will deny, continue to lie and claim our national “innocence,” I come bearing deeply troubling, but not surprising, news: White racism is now comfortably located within the Oval Office, right there at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, embodied in our 45th president, one who is, and I think many would agree, must agree, without any hesitation, a white racist. There are many who will resist this characterization, but Mr. Trump has desecrated the symbolic aspirations of America, exhumed forms of white supremacist discourse that so many would assume is spewed only by Ku Klux Klan.”

Read the rest of Professor Yancy’s op-ed at the link.

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

From lead columnist David Leonhardt and Ian Prasad Philbrick at the NY Times we get “Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/15/opinion/leonhardt-trump-racist.html

Donald Trump has been obsessed with race for the entire time he has been a public figure. He had a history of making racist comments as a New York real-estate developer in the 1970s and ‘80s. More recently, his political rise was built on promulgating the lie that the nation’s first black president was born in Kenya. He then launched his campaign with a speech describing Mexicans as rapists.

The media often falls back on euphemisms when describing Trump’s comments about race: racially loaded, racially charged, racially tinged, racially sensitive. And Trump himself has claimed that he is “the least racist person.” But here’s the truth: Donald Trump is a racist. He talks about and treats people differently based on their race. He has done so for years, and he is still doing so.

Here, we have attempted to compile a definitive list of his racist comments – or at least the publicly known ones.

The New York Years

Trump’s real-estate company tried to avoid renting apartments to African-Americans in the 1970s and gave preferential treatment to whites, according to the federal government.

Trump treated black employees at his casinos differently from whites, according to multiple sources. A former hotel executive said Trump criticized a black accountant: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks.”

In 1989, Trump took out ads in New York newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park; he argued they were guilty as late as October 2016, more than 10 years after DNA evidence had exonerated them.

In 1989, on NBC, Trump said: “I think sometimes a black may think they don’t have an advantage or this and that. I’ve said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I really believe they do have an actual advantage.”

An Obsession With
Dark-Skinned Immigrants

He began his 2016 presidential campaign with a speech disparaging Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.”

He uses the gang MS-13 to disparage all immigrants. Among many other statements, he has suggested that Obama’s protection of the Dreamers — otherwise law-abiding immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children — contributed to the spread of MS-13.

In December 2015, Trump called for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” including refusing to readmit Muslim-American citizens who were outside of the country at the time.

Trump said a federal judge hearing a case about Trump University was biased because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.

In June 2017, Trump said 15,000 recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS” and that 40,000 Nigerians, once seeing the United States, would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.

At the White House on Jan. 11, Trump vulgarly called forless immigration from Haiti and Africa and more from Norway.”

The disgusting list goes on and on. Go to the link to get it all!

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

Also at the NY Times, Charles M. Blow states what by now should have become obvious to the rest of us: “Trump Is A Racist. Period.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/14/opinion/trump-racist-shithole.html

Blow writes:

“I find nothing more useless than debating the existence of racism, particularly when you are surrounded by evidence of its existence. It feels to me like a way to keep you fighting against the water until you drown.

The debates themselves, I believe, render a simple concept impossibly complex, making the very meaning of “racism” frustratingly murky.

So, let’s strip that away here. Let’s be honest and forthright.

Racism is simply the belief that race is an inherent and determining factor in a person’s or a people’s character and capabilities, rendering some inferior and others superior. These beliefs are racial prejudices.

The history of America is one in which white people used racism and white supremacy to develop a racial caste system that advantaged them and disadvantaged others.

Understanding this, it is not a stretch to understand that Donald Trump’s words and deeds over the course of his life have demonstrated a pattern of expressing racial prejudices that demean people who are black and brown and that play to the racial hostilities of other white people.

It is not a stretch to say that Trump is racist. It’s not a stretch to say that he is a white supremacist. It’s not a stretch to say that Trump is a bigot.

Those are just facts, supported by the proof of the words that keep coming directly from him. And, when he is called out for his racism, his response is never to ameliorate his rhetoric, but to double down on it.

I know of no point during his entire life where he has apologized for, repented of, or sought absolution for any of his racist actions or comments.

Instead, he either denies, deflects or amps up the attack.

Trump is a racist. We can put that baby to bed.

“Racism” and “racist” are simply words that have definitions, and Trump comfortably and unambiguously meets those definitions.

We have unfortunately moved away from the simple definition of racism, to the point where the only people to whom the appellation can be safely applied are the vocal, violent racial archetypes.

Racism doesn’t require hatred, constant expression, or even conscious awareness. We want racism to be fringe rather than foundational. But, wishing isn’t an effective method of eradication.

We have to face this thing, stare it down and fight it back.

The simple acknowledgment that Trump is a racist is the easy part. The harder, more substantive part is this: What are we going to do about it?

First and foremost, although Trump is not the first president to be a racist, we must make him the last. If by some miracle he should serve out his first term, he mustn’t be allowed a second. Voters of good conscience must swarm the polls in 2020.

But before that, those voters must do so later this year, to rid the House and the Senate of as many of Trump’s defenders, apologists and accomplices as possible. Should the time come where impeachment is inevitable, there must be enough votes in the House and Senate to ensure it.

We have to stop thinking that we can somehow separate what racists believe from how they will behave. We must stop believing that any of Trump’s actions are clear of the venom coursing through his convictions. Everything he does is an articulation of who he is and what he believes. Therefore, all policies he supports, positions he takes and appointments he makes are suspect.

And finally, we have to stop giving a pass to the people — whether elected official or average voter — who support and defend his racism. If you defend racism you are part of the racism. It doesn’t matter how much you say that you’re an egalitarian, how much you say that you are race blind, how much you say that you are only interested in people’s policies and not their racist polemics.

As the brilliant James Baldwin once put it: “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” When I see that in poll after poll a portion of Trump’s base continues to support his behavior, including on race, I can only conclude that there is no real daylight between Trump and his base. They are part of his racism.

When I see the extraordinary hypocrisy of elected officials who either remain silent in the wake of Trump’s continued racist outbursts or who obliquely condemn him, only to in short order return to defending and praising him and supporting his agenda, I see that there is no real daylight between Trump and them either. They too are part of his racism.

When you see it this way, you understand the enormity and the profundity of what we are facing. There were enough Americans who were willing to accept Trump’s racism to elect him. There are enough people in Washington willing to accept Trump’s racism to defend him. Not only is Trump racist, the entire architecture of his support is suffused with that racism. Racism is a fundamental component of the Trump presidency.

 

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

Back over at the Washington Post, op-ed writer E.J. Dionne, Jr., tells us the depressing news that “We could be a much better country. Trump makes it impossible.” 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-could-be-a-much-better-country-trump-makes-it-impossible/2018/01/14/84bff6dc-f7d4-11e7-b34a-b85626af34ef_story.html?utm_term=.c2151ab89a3c

Dionne concludes his piece with the following observations about our current “Dreamer” debate:

“Our current debate is frustrating, and not only because Trump doesn’t understand what “mutual toleration” and “forbearance” even mean. By persistently making himself, his personality, his needs, his prejudices and his stability the central topics of our political conversation, Trump is blocking the public conversation we ought to be having about how to move forward.

And while Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party will do all they can to avoid the issue, there should now be no doubt (even if this was clear long ago) that we have a blatant racist as our president. His reference to immigrants from “sh–hole countries” and his expressed preference for Norwegians over Haitians, Salvadorans and new arrivals from Africa make this abundantly clear. Racist leaders do not help us reach mutual toleration. His semi-denial 15 hours after his comment was first reported lacked credibility, especially because he called around first to see how his original words would play with his base.

But notice also what Trump’s outburst did to our capacity to govern ourselves and make progress. Democrats and Republicans sympathetic to the plight of the “dreamers” worked out an immigration compromise designed carefully to give Trump what he had said he needed.

There were many concessions by Democrats on border security, “chain migration” based on family reunification, and the diversity visa lottery that Trump had criticized. GOP senators such as Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.) bargained in good faith and were given ample reason by Trump to think they had hit his sweet spot.

Trump blew them away with a torrent of bigotry. In the process, he shifted the onus for avoiding a government shutdown squarely on his own shoulders and those of Republican leaders who were shamefully slow in condemning the president’s racism.

There are so many issues both more important and more interesting than the psyche of a deeply damaged man. We are capable of being a far better nation. But we need leaders who call us to our obligations to each other as free citizens. Instead, we have a president who knows only how to foster division and hatred.”

Read the rest of the op-ed at the link.

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

Our “Liar-in-Chief:” This short video from CNN, featuring the Washington Post’s “Chief Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler deals with the amazing 2000+ false or misleading claims that Trump has made even before the first anniversary of his Presidency: “Trump averages 5-6 false claims a day.”

http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/01/15/president-trump-false-claims-first-year-washington-post.cnn

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

Also on video, even immigration restrictionists sometimes wax eloquent about the exceptional generosity of U.S. immigration and refugee laws (even as they engage in an unending battle to undermine that claimed generosity). But, the reality, as set forth in this short HuffPost video is that on a regular basis our Government knowingly and intentionally returns individuals, mostly Hispanics, to countries where they are likely to be harmed or killed because we are unable to fit them within often hyper-technical and overly restrictive readings of various protection laws or because we are unwilling to exercise humanitarian discretion to save them..

I know first-hand because in my former position as a U.S. Immigration Judge, I sometimes had to tell individuals (and their families) in person that I had to order them returned to a country where I had concluded that they would likely be severely harmed or killed because I could not fit them into any of the categories of protection available under U.S. law. I daresay that very few of the restrictionists who glory in the idea of even harsher and more restrictive immigration laws have had this experience. 

And clearly, Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Steven Miller, Bob Goodlatte and others in the GOP would like to increase the number of humans we return to harm or death by stripping defenseless juveniles and other vulnerable asylum seekers of some of the limited rights they now possess in the false name of “border security.” Indeed, Sessions even invented a false narrative of a fraud-ridden, “attorney-gamed” (how do folks who often don’t even have a chance to get an attorney use attorneys to “game” the system?) asylum system in an attempt to justify his totally indefensible and morally bankrupt position.

Check out this video from HuffPost, entitled “This Is The Violent And Tragic Reality Of Deportation”  to see the shocking truth about how our removal system really works (or not)!

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/this-is-the-violent-and-tragic-reality-of-deportation_us_5a58eeade4b03c41896545f2

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

Thinking of MLK’S “I have a dream,” next, I’ll take you over to The Guardian, where Washington Correspondent Sabrina Siddiqui tells us how “Immigration policy progress and setbacks have become pattern for Dreamers.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/15/dreamers-policy-progress-and-disaster-has-become-a-pattern-trump

Sabrina writes:

“Greisa Martínez Rosas has seen it before: a rare bipartisan breakthrough on immigration policy, offering a glimmer of hope to advocates like herself. Then a swift unraveling.

Martínez is a Dreamer, one of about 700,000 young undocumented migrants, brought to the US as children, who secured temporary protections through Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or Daca.

She considers herself “one of the lucky ones”. Last year, she was able to renew her legal status until 2020, even as Donald Trump threw the Dreamers into limbo by rescinding Daca and declaring a deadline of 5 March for Congress to act to replace it.

Martínez is an activist with United We Dream, the largest youth-led immigration advocacy group in the US. She has fought on the front lines.

In 2010 and 2013, she saw efforts for immigration reform, and a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, culminate in disappointment. She rode a familiar rollercoaster this week, as a bipartisan Daca fix was undermined by Trump’s reported – if contested – reference to African and Central American nations as “shithole countries”.

“It feels like a sequel,” Martínez told the Guardian, adding that Trump’s adversarial views underscored the need to hash out a deal. “This same man is responsible for running a Department of Homeland Security that seeks to hunt and deport people of color.”

Negotiations over immigration have always been precarious. Trump has complicated the picture. After launching his candidacy for president with a speech that called Mexican migrants “rapists” and “killers”, Trump campaigned on deporting nearly 11 million undocumented migrants and building a wall on the Mexico border.

He has, however, shown a more flexible attitude towards Dreamers – despite his move to end their protective status. Last Tuesday, the president sat in the White House, flanked by members of both parties. In a 45-minute negotiating session, televised for full effect, Trump ignited fury among his hardcore supporters by signaling he was open to protection for Dreamers in exchange for modest border security measures.

Then, less than 48 hours later, Trump’s reported comments about countries like Haiti and El Salvador prompted a fierce backlash.

“People are picking their jaws up from the table and they’re trying to recover from feelings of deep hurt and anger,” said Frank Sharry, founder and executive director of America’s Voice, a group which advocates for immigration reform.

“We always knew we were climbing a mountain … but it’s improbable to imagine a positive breakthrough for immigrants with the most nativist president in modern America in charge.”

As the uproar continued, it was nearly forgotten that on Thursday, hours before Trump’s remarks became public, a group of senators announced a bipartisan deal.

Under it, hundreds of thousands of Dreamers would be able to gain provisional legal status and eventually apply for green cards. They would not be able to sponsor their parents for citizenship – an effort to appease Trump’s stance against so-called “chain migration” – but parents would be able to obtain a form of renewable legal status.

There would be other concessions to earn Trump’s signature, such as $2bn for border security including physical barriers, if not by definition a wall.

The compromise would also do away with the diversity visa lottery and reallocate those visas to migrants from underrepresented countries and those who stand to lose Temporary Protected Status. That would help those affected by the Trump administration’s recent decision to terminate such status for some nationals of El Salvador, effectively forcing nearly 200,000 out of the country.

The bill would be far less comprehensive than the one put forward in 2013, when a bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Eight” proposed a bill that would have given nearly 11 million undocumented migrants a path to citizenship.

The bill passed the Senate with rare bipartisan support. In the Republican-led House it never received a vote.

Proponents of reform now believe momentum has shifted in their favor, despite Trump’s ascent. The Arizona senator Jeff Flake, part of the 2013 effort and also in the reform group today, said there was a clear deadline of 5 March to help Dreamers.

“I do think there is a broader consensus to do this than we had before,” Flake told the Guardian. “We’re going have 700,000 kids subject to deportation. That’s the biggest difference.”

Read the rest of the story at the link.

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

Finally, John Blake at CNN tells us “Three ways [you might not know] MLK speaks to our time.”

http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/us/mlk-relevance-today/index.html

“(CNN)“Every hero becomes a bore at last.”

That’s a famous line from the 19th century philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it could also apply to a modern American hero: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
As the nation celebrates King’s national holiday Monday, it’s easy to freeze-frame him as the benevolent dreamer carved in stone on the Washington Mall. Yet the platitudes that frame many King holiday events often fail to mention the most radical aspects of his legacy, says Jeanne Theoharis, a political science professor at Brooklyn College and author of several books on the civil rights movement.
“We turn him into a Thanksgiving parade float, he’s jolly, larger than life and he makes us feel good,” Theoharis says. “We’ve turned him into a mascot.”
Many people vaguely know that King opposed the Vietnam War and talked more about poverty in his later years. But King also had a lot to say about issues not normally associated with civil rights that still resonate today, historians and activists say.

If you’re concerned about inequality, health care, climate change or even the nastiness of our political disagreements, then King has plenty to say to you. To see that version of King, though, we have to dust off the cliches and look at him anew.
If you’re more familiar with your smartphone than your history, try this: Think of King not just as a civil rights hero, but also as an app — his legacy has to be updated to remain relevant.
Here are three ways we can update our MLK app to see how he spoke not only to his time, but to our time as well:
. . . .
The country is still divided by many of the same issues that consumed him.
On the last night of his life, King told a shouting congregation of black churchgoers that “we as a people” would get to “the Promised Land.” That kind of optimism, though, sounds like it belongs to another era.
What we have now is a leader in the White House who denies widespread reports that he complained about Latino and African immigrants coming to America from “shithole” countries; a white supremacist who murders worshippers in church; a social media landscape that pulsates with anger and accusations.
King’s Promised Land doesn’t sound boring when compared to today’s headlines. And maybe that’s what’s so sad about reliving his life every January for some people.
Fifty years after he died, King’s vision for America still sounds so far away.”
Read the complete article at the link.
**************************************
There you have it. A brief but representative sample of some of the many ways in which Dr. King’s dream of a “post racist America” is still relevant and why there’s still much more work still to be done than many of us might have thought several years ago.  
So, the next time you hear bandied about terms like “merit-based” (means: exclude Brown and Black immigrants); “extreme vetting” (means: using bureaucracy to keep Muslims and other perceived “undesirables” out); “tax cuts” (means: handouts to the rich at the expense of the poor); “entitlement reform” (means: cutting benefits for the most vulnerable); “health care reform” (means: kicking the most needy out of the health care system); “voter fraud” (means: suppressing the Black, Hispanic, and Democratic vote); “rule of law” (means: perverting the role of Government agencies and the courts to harm Blacks, Hispanics, Gays, women, the poor, and other minorities); “job creation” (means: destroying our precious natural resources and the environment for the benefit of big corporations), “border security” (means: slashing rights for children and asylum seekers, and more money for building a wall and expanding prisons for non-criminal migrants, a/k/a/ “The New American Gulag”), “ending chain migration” (means keeping non-White and/or non-Christian immigrants from bringing family members) and other deceptively harmless sounding euphemisms, know what the politicos are really up to and consider them in the terms that Dr. King might have.
What’s really behind the rhetoric and how will it help create the type of more fair, just, equal, and value-driven society that majority of us in American seek to be part of and leave to succeeding generations. If it isn’t moving us as a nation toward those goals, “Just Say NO” as Dr. King would have done! 
PWS
01-15-18

NY TIMES: YES, HE’S A RACIST! — AND THE GOP ENCOURAGES/ENABLES HIM! – NOBODY IS GOING TO “SAVE” US FROM TRUMP & THE GOP IF WE DON’T!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/opinion/trump-racist.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0

David Leonhardt writes in the NY Times:

“When it comes to President Trump and race, there is a predictable cycle. He makes a remark that seems racist, and people engage in an extended debate about whether he is personally racist. His critics say he is. His defenders argue for an interpretation in which race plays a secondary role (such as: Haiti really is a worse place to live than Norway).

It’s time to end this cycle.

No one except Trump can know what Trump’s private thoughts or motivations are. But the public record and his behavior are now abundantly clear. Donald Trump treats black people and Latinos differently than he treats white people.

And that makes him a racist.

Is it possible to defend some of his racially charged statements by pointing out that something other than race might explain them? Sure. Is it possible that he doesn’t think of himself as a racist who views white people as superior to nonwhite people? Yes.

But the definition of a racist — the textbook definition, as Paul Ryan might say — is someone who treats some people better than others because of their race. Trump fits that definition many times over:

• Trump’s real-estate company was sued twice by the federal government in the 1970s for discouraging the renting of apartments to African-Americans and preferring white tenants, such as “Jews and executives.”

• He spent years claiming that the nation’s first black president was born not in the United States but in Africa, an outright lie that Trump still has not acknowledged as such.

• He began his 2016 presidential campaign by disparaging Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.”

• He has retweeted white nationalists without apology.

• He frequently criticizes prominent African-Americans for being unpatriotic, ungrateful and disrespectful.

• He called some of those who marched alongside white supremacists in Charlottesville last August “very fine people.”

• He is quick to highlight crimes committed by dark-skinned people, sometimes exaggerating or lying about it (such as a claim about growing crime from “radical Islamic terror” in Britain). He is very slow to decry hate crimes committed against dark-skinned people (such as the murder of an Indian man in Kansas last year).

• At the White House yesterday, Trump vulgarly called for less immigration from Haiti and Africa and more from Norway.

If you think this list is incomplete, email me at Leonhardt@nytimes.com.

For more on this topic, read my colleague Nick Kristof wrestling with the topic during the 2016 campaign: “Here we have a man who for more than four decades has been repeatedly associated with racial discrimination or bigoted comments about minorities,” he wrote. “While any one episode may be ambiguous, what emerges over more than four decades is a narrative arc, a consistent pattern — and I don’t see what else to call it but racism.”

And Slate’s Jamelle Bouie: “It’s impossible to know what’s in his heart. But what Trump feels is less important than what he does.”

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

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the NYT editorial page, Professor Roxane Gay, a distinguished Haitian American writes:

“I could write a passionate rebuttal extolling all the virtues of Haiti, the island my parents are from, the first free black nation in the Western Hemisphere. I could write about the beauty of the island, the music and vibrant art, the majesty of the mountains, the crystalline blue of the water surrounding her, the resilience of the Haitian people, our incredible work ethic, our faith. I could tell you about my parents, how they came to this country with so many other Haitians, how they embraced the American dream and thrived, how I and so many first-generation Haitian-Americans are products of our parents’ American dreams.

Or I could tell you about the singular, oppressive narrative the media trots out when talking about Haiti, the one about an island mired in poverty and misery, the one about AIDS, the one about a country plagued by natural and man-made disasters, because these are the stories people want to hear, the stories that make Haiti into a pitiable spectacle instead of the proud, complicated country it is. I could tell you how I have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy, throughout my life, educating people about Haiti and disabusing them of the damaging, incorrect notions they have about the country of my parents’ birth.

On the eve of the eighth anniversary of the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake that devastated Haiti, the president, in the Oval Office, is said to have wondered aloud why he should allow immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti, El Salvador and African nations to enter the United States. Mr. Trump has tweeted a denial that he made this statement. “He said those hate-filled things and he said them repeatedly,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, who was in the room, said Friday.

But the president has to know that even if video footage of the comment existed, there wouldn’t be any political consequences for him. He has to know, like we all do, that xenophobic commentary plays well with his base, the people who were more than happy to put him in office because they could seamlessly project their racism and misogyny onto his celebrity persona. It’s no wonder Fox News hosts have defended the comment.

Now, in response to the news about the reports of the vile remark, there are people saying “vote” and highlighting the importance of the 2018 midterm elections, as if American democracy is unfettered from interference and corruption. There is a lot of trite rambling about how the president isn’t really reflecting American values when, in fact, he is reflecting the values of many Americans. And there are entreaties to educate the president about the truth of Haiti as if he simply suffers from ignorance.

But the president is not alone in thinking so poorly of the developing world. He didn’t reveal any new racism. He, once again, revealed racism that has been there all along. It is grotesque and we must endure it for another three or seven years, given that the Republicans have a stranglehold on power right now and are more invested in holding onto that power than working for the greater good of all Americans.

What I’m supposed to do now is offer hope. I’m supposed to tell you that no president serves forever. I’m supposed to offer up words like “resist” and “fight” as if rebellious enthusiasm is enough to overcome federally, electorally sanctioned white supremacy. And I’m supposed to remind Americans, once more, of Haiti’s value, as if we deserve consideration and a modicum of respect from the president of the United States only because as a people we are virtuous enough.

But I am not going to do any of that. I am tired of comfortable lies. I have lost patience with the shock supposedly well-meaning people express every time Mr. Trump says or does something terrible but well in character. I don’t have any hope to offer. I am not going to turn this into a teaching moment to justify the existence of millions of Haitian or African or El Salvadoran people because of the gleeful, unchecked racism of a world leader. I am not going to make people feel better about the gilded idea of America that becomes more and more compromised and impoverished with each passing day of the Trump presidency.

This is a painful, uncomfortable moment. Instead of trying to get past this moment, we should sit with it, wrap ourselves in the sorrow, distress and humiliation of it. We need to sit with the discomfort of the president of the United States referring to several countries as “shitholes” during a meeting, a meeting that continued, his comments unchallenged. No one is coming to save us. Before we can figure out how to save ourselves from this travesty, we need to sit with that, too.

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

Thanks primarily to the African-American Community in Alabama, we all were saved from the nightmare of having racist, xenophobic, homophobic theocrat Roy Moore thrust upon the U.S. Senate. But, “White Folks” are going to chip in big time to save the country from Trump and his GOP apologists/handlers/fellow travelers. No less than the future of American Democracy and that of the so-called “Free World” is at stake.

PWS

01-12-18

DAVID LEONHARDT IN THE NY TIMES: THE PARTY OF BIGOTRY, INTOLERANCE, ANTI-AMERICANISM, & “AYATOLLAH ROY” FINDS ITS GROOVE!

Here’s a link to the “Complete Leonhardt” for today, from which the following is excerpted:
https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/2017/10/25/opinion-today?nlid=79213886

 

“This morning’s headlines are about Jeff Flake, but I find myself thinking about Roy Moore. Right now, it seems that the Republican Party has room for Moore but not Flake.

Flake, of course, is the Republican senator and Trump critic who announced yesterday that he wouldn’t run for re-election, because he thought that winning would require giving in to Trumpism. “It is time for our complicity and our accommodation of the unacceptable to end,” he said on the Senate floor.

Moore is the former judge who recently won the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in Alabama. He is also a demagogue who has called homosexuality “evil” and “so heinous” and who engaged in a discussion, on video, about whether it should be “punished by death.”

After Flake’s speech, his Senate colleagues applauded and honored him. But applause is easy. The more important question is: What are those same senators doing about Moore — a man who, unlike President Trump, can still be prevented from taking high office?

They are endorsing him, that’s what.

Mike Lee of Utah has praised Moore’s “tested reputation of integrity.” Rand Paul of Kentucky has lauded Moore for “defending and standing up for the Constitution.” Ted Cruz, just a couple of hours before Flake’s speech, released a full-throated endorsement of Moore that celebrated his “lifelong passion for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

Yes, you heard that correctly: They are praising the integrity and Constitutional commitment of a man who refused to take a stand against whether gay and lesbian Americans should be executed.

Moore was also removed from the Alabama Supreme Court for violating judicial ethics. He has said that Muslims should not be allowed in Congress and suggested that 9/11 was the result of this country’s godlessness. (If you want to read the full comments yourself, you can do so via CNNTime and The Hill.)

So far, only one Republican senator has spoken out against Moore, according to Politico. His name is Jeff Flake. “When we disagree with something so fundamental,” he said last month, “we ought to stand up and say, ‘That’s not right, that’s not our party, that is not us.’”

I leave you with a longer excerpt from Flake’s prepared remarks yesterday than you’re likely to find in most news stories:

“Acting on conscience and principle is the manner in which we express our moral selves, and as such, loyalty to conscience and principle should supersede loyalty to any man or party. We can all be forgiven for failing in that measure from time to time. I certainly put myself at the top of the list of those who fall short in that regard. I am holier-than-none.

“But too often, we rush not to salvage principle but to forgive and excuse our failures so that we might accommodate them and go right on failing — until the accommodation itself becomes our principle.

“In that way and over time, we can justify almost any behavior and sacrifice almost any principle. I’m afraid that this is where we now find ourselves.”

NYT: DAVID LEONHARDT CALLS OUT “BOBBY THE CORK!” — “Put Up Or Shut Up!” — And, While You’re At It, Bobby, How About Accepting Some Responsibility For The Trump Debacle?

https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/2017/10/10/opinion-today?nlid=79213886

Leonhardt writes:

“All talk. A United States senator went on CNBC to explain that while Donald Trump may be an unorthodox politician, “there’s a lot of evolution that is taking place, and I think you’re already seeing that.”
To everyone who argued that Trump was unfit for the presidency, the senator had a ready answer: “My advice would be to chill for a while,” he said. “My sense is that a lot of people who have been resisting will become more comfortable.”
The senator was Bob Corker of Tennessee, and he was speaking on the show “Squawk Box” in May 2016. Today, of course, Corker has become Trump’s newest enemy, saying that the president is “on the path to World War III” and that the White House has become “an adult day care center.”
So what is Senator Corker’s responsibility now, given the crucial role that he and other eminent Republicans played in making Trump seem normal enough to win the presidency? James Fallows answers that question in The Atlantic. “Talk is better than nothing,” Fallows writes, “but action is what counts.”
As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Corker has the ability to hold hearings about the threat Trump poses to the country and the world, Fallows notes. Michelle Goldberg of The Times writes that Congress can also bar “the president from launching a nuclear first strike without a congressional declaration of war.”
I’ll add to that list: Corker and other senators can bring Trump’s legislative agenda to a complete halt until he begins acting more responsibly. No talk of a tax cut until he stops talking of nuclear war. Even the most ardent tax cutter should be willing to make that trade.
The reality that Corker has described — with an out-of-control president — is chilling. Trump, as Fallows puts it, is “irrational, ill-informed, impulsive, unfit for command, and increasingly a danger to the country and the world.”
It’s not enough to merely withhold support from Trump or to criticize him. Members of Congress have an unmatched ability to prevent damage by this president. Those members, like Corker, who ushered Trump into power by describing a man who doesn’t exist, bear a particular burden.”

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

Neither acting on their criticisms of Trump nor accepting responsibility are in the GOP’s tool box. Nor has the GOP shown the slightest interest or ability to govern in a bipartisan manner for the national interest.

The modern GOP is a toxic and motley collection of rich guys, xenophobes, war-mongers, theologues, racists, White Nationalists, science deniers, anti-intellectuals, and anarchists each apparently vying to be more selfish and irresponsible than the next. Where was “Bobby the Cork” when Trump and the GOP were planning to destroy Americans’ health care and tank insurance markets to reward fat cats with undeserved and unneeded tax breaks? He was right there on the Trump-GOP-Turtle “Destroy America Because We Promised To Do It Bandwagon.” Talk is cheap — responsible action is something else.  I’ll believe it when I see it coming from “Bobby the Cork” and his GOP fellow travelers!

PWS

10-10-17

 

 

 

 

THE LIARS ON THE HILL: Spurred By Trump’s Example, GOP Legislators and Politicos In Washington Have Taken Outright Lying And Knowingly Spreading False Narratives To A New Level

Dave Leonhardt writes in “Opinion Today” at the NYT:

“First, health care: Here’s a giveway about how bad the new Senate health care bill is: Bill Cassidy, one of its authors, keeps trying to sell it by telling untruths.
“The relatively new phenomenon of just ‘up is down’ lying about your bill’s impacts is jarring,” says Loren Adler of the USC-Brookings-Schaeffer Initiative on Health Policy.
Most egregiously, Cassidy is claiming that the bill would not ultimately deprive sick people of health insurance. That’s false, as NPR calmly explained when Cassidy said otherwise.
In fact, the bill — known as Graham-Cassidy — would free states to remove insurance protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Without those protections, insurers could price such people out of the market.

If you get cancer (or even have a family history of it) or your child is born with a birth defect — among many, many other health issues — you could find yourself unable to buy insurance. Without insurance, you could be denied crucial treatments. In a tangible way, Graham-Cassidy would harm millions of Americans.
Aviva Aron-Dine and Sarah Kliff have both written good explainers on this issue. As Kliff notes, “There is literally no analysis” to support Cassidy’s claim that the bill would expand the number of insured.
Jimmy Kimmel, the country’s most unexpected health wonk, has urged Cassidy to stop “jamming this horrible bill down our throats.”

Insurers came out against the bill yesterday, joining doctors, hospitals, AARP, patient advocates, multiple governors and others.
Meanwhile, Republican leaders are trying to win the vote of Lisa Murkowski — one of three Republican senators who voted against a previous Obamacare repeal bill, in July — by funneling money to Alaska.
In the least surprising development of all, President Trump is now repeating Cassidy’s falsehoods.
The last word on health care this morning goes to Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan. “Graham-Cassidy is a brazen effort to block any level of government, state or federal, from achieving near-universal coverage,” he writes. “That’s what the debate is about. Everything else is just noise.”

Read Leonhardt’s entire piece with working links to his sources and citations at this link:

https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/2017/09/21/opinion-today?nlid=79213886

 

And Leonhardt is by no means the only one blowing the whistle on the GOP’s latest War on America. Among many others, the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” awarded Senator Cassidy “Three Pinocchios” for his false claims about coverage:

“Regular readers of The Fact Checker know that the burden of proof falls on the person making the claim. Cassidy has provided little evidence to support his claim of more coverage, except that innovation would flourish and help bring down costs and expand coverage. That’s certainly possible, but it would be more plausible if his proposal did not slash funding to such an extent.

Kimmel’s claim that 30 million fewer Americans will have insurance may be a high-end estimate. But already, in 2019, CBO calculations suggest at least 15 million fewer Americans would have insurance once the individual and employer mandates are repealed. Much of that decline might be by choice, but Cassidy insists the gap will be filled and then exceeded in 10 years. Unlike Cassidy, no prominent health-care analyst is willing to venture a guess on coverage levels — but the consensus is that his funding formula makes his claim all but impossible to achieve.

Given the lack of coverage estimates by the CBO or other health-care experts, Cassidy’s claim does not quite rise to Four Pinocchios. But it certainly merits a Three.

Three Pinocchios”

Here’s a link to the complete analysis by the Post’s Glenn Kessler:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/09/21/sen-cassidys-rebuttal-to-jimmy-kimmel-more-people-will-have-coverage/

Wow! Three Pinocchios is getting into Trump, Sessions, Miller territory!

PWS

09-21-17

🤥 🤥🤥

 

 

 

POLITICS: David Leonhardt In The NYT: Don’t Get Distracted From GOP’s Dishonesty & Cruelty!

“David Leonhardt
Op-Ed Columnist
The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the House health care bill is a devastating indictment.
The report, released yesterday, showed that millions of Americans would lose health insurance and the quality of insurance for millions more would deteriorate. The savings from that carnage — to borrow a favorite word of President Trump’s — would pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.
And yet the immediate reaction to the C.B.O. report also shows why you should be worried that the Senate will nonetheless decide to pass a version of the House bill.
Here’s what I mean: Much of this initial reaction has missed the point. It has focused on the modest differences between the new C.B.O. report, which analyzed the final House bill, and a C.B.O. analysis from March of an earlier version of the bill. Among the differences, the final bill would deprive an estimated 23 million people of insurance, compared with the 24 million in the March analysis.
Don’t be distracted by these small differences.
Distraction is a tactic of the politicians who are trying to take away health insurance from people. These politicians can’t sell their proposals on the merits. That’s why both the House and, thus far, the Senate have refused to hold any hearings. They know that virtually every expert across the ideological spectrum — including groups representing doctors, nurses, hospitals, patients and senior citizens — opposes the bill.
Unable to win a debate on its merits, Republican leaders need to change the subject. They can’t let their proposals be judged on whether they improve the American health care system, because they don’t. They need to create a lower standard by which the plan will be judged.
The House did so in the frantic week that it passed its bill by pointing to a last-minute amendment that made a superficial improvement. House members then claimed they had fixed their bill.
Senate leaders are showing signs of following the same path — and the C.B.O. report gives them a chance to start down it. The report will encourage top Republicans to claim that their bill is already getting better and that the Senate will keep improving it in coming months.
In truth, the bill is fatally flawed. Its objective is to reduce federal spending on health insurance for the middle class, poor, sick, elderly and disabled in order to cut taxes for the wealthy. Maybe the final version, once the Senate has made its tweaks, will take insurance from 23 million people, or maybe 15 million people. But any law based on the House bill is guaranteed to worsen the health care system.
That’s the overwhelming message of the C.B.O. report.
The saddest part of this situation is that our health care system, including Obamacare, very much needs improvement. And there are solid bipartisan ideas out there, including some that would increase states’ flexibility or lower consumer expenses. The Senate has members from both parties with the savvy and the policy chops — like Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray — to turn those ideas into a bill.
Is it too much to hope that they cast aside the distractions from the House’s failed plan and start fresh?
The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including Abbe Gluck on the G.O.P.’s sabotage of Obamacare.”

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

Read more in today’s NYT.

PWS

05-25-17

 

POLITICS: GOP Senate’s “Stealth Plan” To Strip Health Care From Millions While Enriching Fat Cats Exposed!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/opinion/health-care-bill-senate.html?emc=edit_ty_20170523&nl=opinion-today&nlid=79213886&te=1&_r=0

David Leonhardt writes in a NY Times op-ed:

“While the rest of the country has been transfixed by Trumpian chaos, members of the Senate have spent the last two weeks talking about taking health insurance from millions of Americans.

There is an alarmingly large chance that they’ll decide to do so. But if they do, they will almost certainly rely on a political sleight of hand to disguise their bill’s damage. Understanding that sleight of hand — and calling attention to it — offers the best hope for defeating the bill.

The effort to take health insurance from the middle class and poor and funnel the savings into tax cuts for the rich is a little like mold. It grows best in the dark.

That’s why Republican leaders in the House handled their bill as they did. They did not hold a single hearing, because they knew that attention would have been devastating.

Just imagine a hearing featuring the leaders of these groups, every one of which opposes the House bill: the American Medical Association, American Nurses Association, American Hospital Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, American Lung Association, March of Dimes and AARP.
The House also passed its final bill without waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to estimate how many Americans would lose insurance. The C.B.O. will release that analysis tomorrow afternoon. There is no precedent, outside of wartime, for passing a bill this important in such haste.

After the House did, many observers assumed the bill was too flawed to have much chance in the Senate. Republican senators, aware of the bill’s unpopularity, were careful to say publicly that they would start fresh. But the early signs suggest that Mitch McConnell and his Republican caucus are actually mimicking the House approach.

Think of it as the Upton strategy, and I’ll explain the name in a minute.”

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

Yet, the voters keep putting these guys in office. Unless you are part of the tiny percentage of over-privileged, rich elite in America, you’re voting against not only our country’s best interests, but your own!

Amazingly, however, the Democrats have failed to come up with an effective strategy to capitalize on this. And, to date, I’m not sure I’ve heard any compelling arguments as to how and why Democrats will do better in the next election.

Yeah, Trump and his cohorts have problems galore. But, highlighting/relying on that was Hillary’s primary strategy in 2016. And, it failed! Big time! What positive plan do Democrats have for making America better for everyone (including most Trump supporters)?

PWS

05-23-17

 

NYT OP-ED: DAVID LEONHARDT: Web Of Lies!

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/opinion/all-the-presidents-lies.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_ty_20170321&nl=opinion-today&nl_art=2&nlid=79213886&ref=headline&te=1&_r=0&referer=

Leonhardt writes:

“The ninth week of Donald Trump’s presidency began with the F.B.I. director calling him a liar.

The director, the very complicated James Comey, didn’t use the L-word in his congressional testimony Monday. Comey serves at the pleasure of the president, after all. But his meaning was clear as could be. Trump has repeatedly accused Barack Obama of wiretapping his phones, and Comey explained there is “no information that supports” the claim.

I’ve previously argued that not every untruth deserves to be branded with the L-word, because it implies intent and somebody can state an untruth without doing so knowingly. George W. Bush didn’t lie when he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and Obama didn’t lie when he said people who liked their current health insurance could keep it. They made careless statements that proved false (and they deserved much of the criticism they got).

But the current president of the United States lies. He lies in ways that no American politician ever has before. He has lied about — among many other things — Obama’s birthplace, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Sept. 11, the Iraq War, ISIS, NATO, military veterans, Mexican immigrants, Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitic attacks, the unemployment rate, the murder rate, the Electoral College, voter fraud and his groping of women.

He tells so many untruths that it’s time to leave behind the textual parsing over which are unwitting and which are deliberate — as well as the condescending notion that most of Trump’s supporters enjoy his lies.

Trump sets out to deceive people. As he has put it, “I play to people’s fantasies.”

Caveat emptor: When Donald Trump says something happened, it should not change anyone’s estimation of whether the event actually happened. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. His claim doesn’t change the odds.

Which brings us to Russia.”

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

Read what Leonhardt has to say about Trump’s “Russia connection” and more in the full op ed at the above link.

PWS

03/21/17