Jake Tapper – immigrationcourtside.com

🚩POLITICS: GOP’S BAKUNINIST CLOWN SHOW SOWS AMERICAN CHAOS!🤮☠️

Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876)Anarchist PHOTO: Wikipedia While nobody in today’s GOP is close to being on an intellectual level with the “Father of Modern Anarchy,” they are staunch disciples of his disruptive philosophy. — Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876)
Anarchist
PHOTO: Wikipedia
While nobody in today’s GOP is close to being on an intellectual level with the “Father of Modern Anarchy,” they are staunch disciples of his disruptive philosophy.

BAKUNINIST — One who advocates revolutionary anarchism.

Jackie Calmes in the LA Times:

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=0544106b-7413-483c-9f58-c0b43ca7853d

. . . .

And that’s because so many in the party — elected officials and voters — won’t be led. Republicans have the majority in the House, but it’s a majority in name only. In reality, the House Republicans are an amalgam of competing factions, from right to far-right to extremist, and party members genuinely loathe one another more than they dislike Democrats.

Conservative media and social media stardom have turned even the most junior and otherwise inconsequential figures — say, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, the architect of this speaker-less anarchy — into power brokers who insist on having their sway. Like-minded conservative voters — small-dollar donors steeped in Fox News — bankroll the chaos agents; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, that Georgia peach of a provocateur, is among Congress’ most successful fundraisers.

Here’s how insurgent and “Beetlejuice” fan Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado explained why House Republicans have failed to agree on a speaker: “There are 224 alpha males and alpha females who are here in the Republican Party. We are here because we convinced hundreds of thousands of people that we are leaders.”

No matter how this speaker mess ends — and it must somehow end — that perverse reward system will remain. And the House under Republican “leadership” will be all but ungovernable through the 2024 election.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi had a similarly thin Democratic majority yet managed to keep her party factions united and to shepherd into law major legislation, some of it bipartisan. But here’s the difference: Democrats believe in governance. Too many Republicans do not; their credo has shifted over the last quarter century from small government to anti-government. We’re watching the result.

Again, take it from a Republican: “Frankly, it doesn’t matter who the speaker is,” Rep. Mike Lawler of New York said, “because if we [Republicans] can’t govern as a group, as a conference, it doesn’t matter.”

Jordan, true to his brand as a belligerent, on Friday insisted on a third House vote for speaker. As widely predicted, he lost by even more votes than on the earlier ballots. He and his allies talked of pressing his candidacy through the weekend; after all, McCarthy was elected in January on the 15th ballot. But in a closed-door caucus and with secret ballots, Republicans voted to yank Jordan’s nomination as speaker.

His refusal to accept that he was not going to be speaker until the reality was forced on him was hardly a surprise. Jordan still won’t concede that Donald Trump lost reelection. He declined to do so yet again at a news conference Friday morning. His stubborn opposition to democracy — that’s what it is — only underscored why Jordan should never be the speaker.

The sad fact, however, is that Jordan’s reprehensible role as Trump’s chief congressional lieutenant in the run-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection wasn’t even much of a factor in opponents’ thinking. Nor was the fact that as speaker, this unrepentant election denier could have sabotaged the certification of the 2024 presidential vote if the Republican lost.

Instead, the reasons Jordan’s foes gave were personal, political or both. Some blamed him for stoking the death threats against them and their families. One, Rep. Drew Ferguson of Georgia, said Republicans don’t “need a bully as the speaker.”

But they need someone — the country needs someone — so Congress can function. Government funding runs out Nov. 17. Biden is sending a request for aid to Ukraine and Israel. Other essential legislation, including agriculture and defense bills, are pending.

Many Republicans are trying to shift the blame for the fiasco onto Democrats because they all opposed McCarthy and then Jordan — as if Republicans would’ve voted to retain Pelosi had an insurgent Democrat ever moved, like Gaetz did against McCarthy, to unseat her.

But they know the blame actually lies with themselves — thus the name-calling and near-fisticuffs.

They need to come together, if only temporarily. And then voters should fire them in 2024.

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

Today’s GOP is a thuggy gang of anarchists out to destroy America and destabilize the world — mostly because they believe they can, and complicit GOP voters have inflicted these ignorant, valueless, yet existentially dangerous, clowns upon the rest of us!

Totally classless and obstructionist till the end, Jordan forced his colleagues to vote to rescind his never-viable nomination for Speaker after losing three floor votes by increasing margins. By contrast, Scalise, the Conference’s initial nominee over Jordan withdrew without a vote upon determining that he lacked the votes to win the job.

Appearing on CNN Sunday, former GOP Representative Liz Cheney described some of her erstwhile colleagues as “White supremacists,” “anti-semitic,” and “involved directly” in the illegitimate attempt to seize power and overturn Biden’s election. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/liz-cheney-kevin-mccarthy-house-gop_n_6535ea7ce4b0689b3fbcfc66.

Yet, inexplicably, some in the “mainstream media”continue to treat the GOP as a “normal” opposition party. In one of a continuing string of jaw-droppingly poor choices for guests, NBC’s Kristen Walker gave deposed ex-Speaker McCarthy a forum to engage in a “Trumpian liefest” of mythic proportions, outrageously attempting to blame Dems, the Border, Biden, Jeffries, the GOP insurrectionists he empowered, and just about anyone but himself for the debacle he helped engineer and his morally bankrupt party carried out!

Every viewer should have felt dumber after watching Welker fruitlessly try to control the astounding stream of lies, nonsense, doublespeak, and intentional misrepresentations coming out of McCarthy. Honestly, that’s what Fox News, Breitbart, and the Examiner are for! No need to give shallow politicos with absolutely nothing to contribute another forum! I’ve always been a Kristen Welker fan, but her first month as moderator of Meet the Press can only be described as something between tragic and horrible.

As Calmes says, “fire [the GOP] in 2024.” The future of America, the world, and humanity might depend on the n common sense and decency of the majority of voters!

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

PWS

10-23-23

JRUBE: Trump & Pence Constantly Lie About Immigration & Human Rights — Reporters Are Sticking It To Them In Real Time!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/24/trumps-lies-need-be-exposed-real-time/

Jennifer Rubin writes in the WashPost:

In an interview on “Meet the Press,” President Trump repeated a whopper of a lie.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:

Separation, President Obama, I took over separation. I’m the one that put it together. What’s happened though are the cartels and all of these bad people, they’re using the kids. They’re, they’re, it’s almost like slavery.

CHUCK TODD:

But let’s not punish the kids more.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:

No this has been happening —

CHUCK TODD:

Aren’t you — the kids are getting punished more.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:

You’re right. And this has been happening long before I got there. What we’ve done is we’ve created, we’ve, we’ve ended separation. You know, under President Obama you had separation. I was the one that ended it. Now I said one thing, when I ended it I said, “Here’s what’s going to happen. More families are going to come up.” And that’s what’s happened. But they’re really coming up for the economics. But once you ended the separation. But I ended separation. I inherited separation from President Obama.

The Post’s fact-checkers back in April explained: “The Obama administration rejected a plan for family separations, according to Cecilia Muñoz, Obama’s top adviser for immigration. The Trump administration operated a pilot program for family separations in the El Paso area beginning in mid-2017.” Trump’s claim that “Obama did it first” is both morally vapid and completely wrong: “The Trump administration implemented this policy by choice, exercising its discretion to prosecute some crimes over others. But no law or court ruling mandates family separations. In fact, during its first 15 months, the Trump administration released nearly 100,000 immigrants who were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border, a total that includes more than 37,500 unaccompanied minors and more than 61,000 family-unit members.” In short, “The zero-tolerance approach is worlds apart from the Obama- and Bush-era policy of separating children from adults at the border only in limited circumstances, such as when officials suspected human trafficking or another kind of danger to the child or when false claims of parentage were made.”

Jake Tapper at CNN showed the right way to confront administration members on Sunday, when he went right after Vice President Pence’s misrepresentations about the dismal condition of children still held. After playing a clip of administration lawyers arguing in the 9th Circuit that there was no responsibility to provide basic necessities to children such as toothbrushes, Pence tried to claim that he didn’t know what the lawyers were saying. Tapper kept after him:

”But this is going on right now,” Tapper said, adding “This is the wealthiest nation in the world. We have money to give toothpaste and soap and blankets to these kids in this facility in El Paso County. Right now, we do.”

“Well, of course — of course we do,” Pence said.

“So why aren’t we?” Taper asked.

Pence again dodged the question with a snicker, replying “My point is — my point is, it’s all a part of the appropriations process.”

Tapper then had to cut Pence off from the lengthy digression that followed in order to force the question again.

“But I’m talking about the kids — I’m talking about the kids our custody right now,” Taper said. “Just listen to this. This is ‘The New Yorker’ citing a team of lawyers who visited a border facility.”

Pence tried to interrupt him again, but Tapper insisted “I just want to quote this.”

“The conditions the lawyers were found were shocking,” Tapper read. “Flu and lice outbreaks were going untreated. Children were filthy, sleeping on cold floors, taking care of each other because of the lack of attention from guards.”

“I know you. You’re a father. You’re a man of faith. You can’t approve of that,” Tapper said.

“Well, I — I — no — no American — no American should approve of this mass influx of people coming across our border,” Pence stammered. It is overwhelming our system at the southern border.

“But how about how we’re treating these children?” Tapper asked, again, and Pence deflected, again.

“I was at the detention center in Nogales just a few short months ago. It is a heartbreaking scene,” Pence said, but then added These are people who are being exploited by human traffickers, who charge them $5,000 a person to entice them to take their vulnerable children…”

“But now these kids are in our custody,” Tapper said.

Pence continued to blame Democrats in Congress, but Tapper again reiterated “But I would say that I’m talking about the kids on our southern border right now.”

He told Pence “you have the power right now to go back to the White House and say, we need to make sure that these kids — first of all, that there are people taking care of them, so it is not 12-year-olds taking care of 3-year-olds, and, second of all, that they have soap, that they have toothbrushes, that they have combs, that we’re taking care so they don’t all get the flu.”

Pence once again tried to blame Democrats, to which Tapper replied “I think Democrats would argue that they want to do a deal with President Trump, but he hasn’t showed any inclination.”

That’s precisely how reporters need to go after Trump and his morally deficient administration. This is the Trump administration’s policy. This is the Trump administration’s doing. This is the Trump administration’s refusal to address basic humanitarian needs (while raiding the Defense Department to build a useless wall that has nothing to do with asylum seekers presenting themselves at the border).

CONTENT FROM SAFEWAY

2019 is the year of grilling vegetables

Four recipes to try if you if you want to try your hand at barbecued veggies.

Allowing Trump and his ilk to bluster and flat-out lie their way through interviews might be the path of least resistance when trying to cover a lot of ground. However, if Trump and his teammates are not stopped dead in their tracks, the media become a platform for deceiving voters.

Headlines that echo the president — “Trump says Obama did it first” — are equally reprehensible. (It should be “Trump falsely blames Obama for his own policy.”) Trump, Pence and the rest are accustomed to running through their ridiculous talking points (e.g. the United States has the cleanest water and air in the world) without objection on outlets such as Fox. Other media can and must do better. And when the general-election debates roll around, moderators must be willing to correct misstatements of fact. (Or follow up by asking, “But that’s not true, is it Mr. President?”)

We’re at risk of losing not only a shared set of facts but also a uniform belief that there are such things as facts. That’s straight out of the autocratic playbook — one that the media cannot facilitate.

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

Another part of the Trump, Pence, GOP “Big Lie” — that folks are coming “illegally.” Actually, they are coming and turning themselves in to apply for legal status which they are entitled to do under our laws and international treaties. Trump & Pence actually eliminated the only program allowing folks from the Northern Triangle to seek refugee status from outside the U.S.

What is illegal is the Trump Administration’s failure to promptly and fairly process individuals at ports of entry and returning those who have passed the first step of the process, known as “credible fear,” to Mexico where they are in danger, prevented from getting lawyers of their choice as authorized by statute, and inhibited from fairly and completely presenting their asylum cases before U.S. Immigration Judges (who themselves are not independent, fair, and impartial adjudicators since they work for Attorney General, Trump protector, and self-styled enforcement guru Bill Barr).

Oh, and how about a moratorium on Trump’s Golf Trips and Pence’s religious proselytizing trips on the public dime until every kid in Government custody has a bed, blanket, toothbrush, and a bar of soap?

No, it isn’t really about Congressional appropriations (although the GOP in Congress certainly bears a major part of the blame for Trump’s audacious violations of human rights). Congress didn’t waste money that could and should have been spent on the welfare of asylum seekers on less important things like walls, tent cities, detention, and other “built to fail” initiatives that have done little or nothing to advance the fair and effective administration of our asylum laws. Nor did Congress make the decision not to be prepared to process the asylum seekers who have been slowly and methodically heading north since before last Thanksgiving. You wouldn’t need the world’s best intelligence service to figure out the rate of flow and predict how many might need processing.

As those of us who understand immigration know, desperate people are likely to continue to leave the failed states of the Northern Triangle until the international community deals with the causes of the migration.

Everything the U.S. has done under the “maliciously incompetent” Trump Administration, from encouraging environmental degradation, to withdrawing refugee programs and aid programs, to dumb, anti-human rhetoric, to egging Mexico on to a militarized rather than a human rights response, to idiotically trying to ”enforce” our way out of a humanitarian crisis notwithstanding decades of experience and data showing it won’t work, to empowering gangs, smugglers, cartels, and corrupt government officials, to intentionally backlogging Immigration Courts while destroying established legal principles that could have led to “fast track grants” of many deserving domestic violence asylum cases, to tying up the Federal Courts with frivolous litigation, to intentional child abuse, has made the situation immeasurably and unnecessarily worse.

Yes, Trump might be able to get away with killing and abusing hundreds, perhaps thousands, in Mexico. But even this predictable bloodbath, which he hopes to keep out of sight as the U.S. media loses interest, won’t solve the problem in the long run.

Every day Trump remains in office we diminish ourselves as a nation; but, that won’t stop human migration. It will just leave us as diminished, dehumanized, shells of humanity. It’s time to “just say no to Trump and his supporters and enablers” as they seek to destroy America!

PWS

06-25-19

Problems Mount For Administration On Travel Ban — Can’t Find Support For Their “Pre-Hatched” Conclusions — Stephen Miller Shoots Off Mouth Again — DOJ Litigators Undoubtedly Cringe As In-Court Statements Undermined!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/a-new-travel-ban-with-mostly-minor-technical-differences-that-probably-wont-cut-it-analysts-say/2017/02/22/8ae9d7e6-f918-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html?utm_term=.e2b487b295a7

Matt Zapotsky writes in the Washington Post:

“Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller said President Trump’s revised travel ban will have “mostly minor technical differences” from the iteration frozen by the courts, and Americans would see “the same basic policy outcome for the country.”

That is not what the Justice Department has promised. And legal analysts say it might not go far enough to allay the judiciary’s concerns.

A senior White House official said Wednesday that Trump will issue a revised executive order on immigration next week, as the administration is working to make sure the implementation goes smoothly. Trump had said previously that the order would come this week. Neither the president nor his top advisers have detailed exactly what the new order will entail. Miller’s comments on Fox News, while vague, seem to suggest the changes might not be substantive. And that could hurt the administration’s bid to lift the court-imposed suspension on the ban, analysts said.

“If you’re trying to moot out litigation, which is to say, ‘Look, this litigation is no longer necessary,’ it is very bad to say our intent here is to engage in the prohibited outcome,” said Leon Fresco, who worked in the office of immigration litigation in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/02/23/white-house-gives-plenty-of-ammunition-to-travel-bans-opponents/?utm_term=.9442c17ff14b

Jennifer Rubin writes in Right Turn in today’s Washington Post:

“Opponents of President Trump’s travel ban have one big advantage — the Trump White House. If not for the confusion, lack of staffing (nary a deputy, let alone an undersecretary or assistant secretary, has been named in national security-related departments), organizational disarray, policy differences or all of the above, the administration might have put together on its first try a legally enforceable executive order. It might by now even have come up with a new executive order, thanks to a road map provided by the 9th Circuit. However, the rollout has been pushed back to next week.

Understand that if this is such a matter of urgent concern, the president would have had his advisers working around the clock on this (not transgender bathroom assignments, plans to deport non-criminal illegal immigrants or haggling with Mexican officials over a wall that Trump insists they pay for). In fact, since the point of the ban is to initiate a review of our vetting procedures, you’d think that the Homeland Security Department would already have come up with its proposed “extreme vetting” recommendations.

Meanwhile, the president and his staff continue to provide legal ammunition to opponents of the ban. On Tuesday, senior adviser Stephen Miller in a Fox News interview boldly declared, “Fundamentally, you’re still going to have the same basic policy outcome for the country, but you’re going to be responsive to a lot of very technical issues that were brought up by the court.” Just to remind the courts of the administration’s arrogance, Miller proclaimed that there was nothing wrong with the first order.

“By saying that the policy effects of the new travel ban will be essentially the same as those of the travel ban that so many federal judges found constitutionally suspect, Miller is effectively inviting federal courts to suspend the new one as well, given that the religiously discriminatory history of the ban can’t be ignored, much less erased, simply by purporting to start over again,” Supreme Court litigator and professor Larry Tribe tells me. “If, as I am told, the new ban is a more artfully disguised version of [an] anti-Muslim measure, without explicit preferences for religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries (i.e., for Christians) written into the very text of the ban, then some judges might be less inclined to issue a temporary restraining order, but most federal judges would be savvy enough to recognize that they are being treated to a masquerade.”

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/23/politics/white-house-effort-to-justify-travel-ban-causes-growing-concern-for-some-intel-officials/index.html

Meanwhile, Jake Tapper and Pamela Brown on CNN highlight more difficulties with the Administration’s “shoot first, ask questions later” approach:

“Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump has assigned the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice Department, to help build the legal case for its temporary travel ban on individuals from seven countries, a senior White House official tells CNN.

Other Trump administration sources tell CNN that this is an assignment that has caused concern among some administration intelligence officials, who see the White House charge as the politicization of intelligence — the notion of a conclusion in search of evidence to support it after being blocked by the courts. Still others in the intelligence community disagree with the conclusion and are finding their work disparaged by their own department.
“DHS and DOJ are working on an intelligence report that will demonstrate that the security threat for these seven countries is substantial and that these seven countries have all been exporters of terrorism into the United States,” the senior White House official told CNN. “The situation has gotten more dangerous in recent years, and more broadly, the refugee program has been a major incubator for terrorism.”

The report was requested in light of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ conclusion that the Trump administration “has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States.” The seven counties are Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
The senior White House official said the desire to bolster the legal and public case that these seven countries pose a threat is a work in progress and as of now, it’s not clear if DHS and DOJ will offer separate reports or a joint report.
One of the ways the White House hopes to make its case is by using a more expansive definition of terrorist activity than has been used by other government agencies in the past. The senior White House official said he expects the report about the threat from individuals the seven countries to include not just those terrorist attacks that have been carried out causing loss of innocent American life, but also those that have resulted in injuries, as well as investigations into and convictions for the crimes of a host of terrorism-related actions, including attempting to join or provide support for a terrorist organization.
The White House did not offer an on-the-record comment for this story despite numerous requests.

. . . .

Asked about the report Thursday on “The Lead,” Rep. Dan Donovan, R-New York, emphasized that the intelligence community be nonpartisan.
“They should take data, take information, shouldn’t interpret it in a political way and provide the President the information he needs to make decisions to protect our country,” he said.
Also commenting on the report was Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who acknowledged that he hadn’t seen the specifics but “it looks wrong to me.”
“We ought to be doing the intel first, then set the policy and in large part based upon the intelligence,” Haass said. “If these reports are true, it’s yet another example where this administration is having real trouble ing a functional relationship with the intelligence community.”

[Emphasis supplied in all quotes]

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

I was never a “line litigator.” But, I was involved in defending and prosecuting thousands of cases during the “Legacy INS Phase” of my career. I also participated in thousands more cases as an appellate and trial judge during the last 21 years at EOIR.

One of my jobs in providing litigation assistance as the Deputy General Counsel of the INS was to make sure my “institutional clients” did not comment on pending cases. Such comments both unnecessarily antagonized the judges hearing the cases and, on occasion, when folks didn’t heed my instructions, completely “tanked” our positions by giving our opponents new arguments.

As a sitting judge, I can guarantee that one of the least successful approaches was for a lawyer to insult my intelligence or integrity and then turn around and ask me to help out his or her client. Sure, in the end, I had to separate the law from the lawyer and do the right thing. But, it certainly interfered with the effectiveness of the lawyer’s communication and made it more difficult for me to get to the substance of his or her client’s case.

And, one thing that certainly infuriated all judges, including me, was for a lawyer to represent one thing in court and then have his or her client do something else. It made me lose confidence in the lawyer’s reliability and integrity and his or her ability to control and speak for the client. I can remember “chewing out” several lawyers at Master Calendar for misrepresenting facts or law to me in their briefs or oral arguments.

It appears that the Trump Administration’s combination of arrogance, ignorance, and disrespect for the court system and the role of judges is undermining both their credibility and the credibility of the Department of Justice career lawyers whose job is to represent them over and over again before most of the same judges. Once a judge loses faith in the credibility of a lawyer and/or her or his client, “bad things will happen” and they do.

PWS

02/23/17

BAKUNINIST — One who advocates revolutionary anarchism.

Jackie Calmes in the LA Times:

🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!

Related posts:

Related posts:

Related posts: