🇺🇸🗽IN MEMORIAM: BELOVED “PRACTICAL SCHOLAR” DR. DEMETRIOS G. PAPADEMETRIOU, DIES @ 75 — Renowned Migration Expert Co-Founded Migration Policy Institute, Among Many Other Life Achievements!

As reported on ImmigrationProf Blog:

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2022/01/mpi-honors-the-life-of-dr-demetrios-papademetriou.html

Friday, January 28, 2022

MPI Honors the Life of Dr. Demetrios Papademetriou

By Immigration Prof

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Dr. Demetrios G. Papademetriou, president emeritus and co-founder of Migration Policy Institute, and founding president of MPI Europe, died Wednesday, January 26, at the age of 75. He was one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars and lecturers on international migration, with a rich body of scholarship shared in more than 275 books, research reports, articles and other publications. He also advised numerous governments, international organizations, civil society groups and grant-making organizations around the world on immigration and immigrant integration issues.

Papademetriou began his career as Executive Editor of the International Migration Review. After stints at Population Associates International and the U.S. Labor Department, he served as Chair of the Migration Group of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He then joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s International Migration Policy Program, which in 2001 was spun off to create the freestanding Migration Policy Institute.

He co-founded Metropolis: An International Forum for Research and Policy on Migration and Cities, which he led as International Chair for the initiative’s first five years and then served as International Chair Emeritus. He was Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Migration (2009-11) and founding Chair of the Advisory Board of the Open Society Foundations’ International Migration Initiative (2010-15).

Papademetriou, who traveled the world lecturing and speaking at public conferences and private roundtables, also taught at the University of Maryland, Duke University, American University and the New School for Social Research.

MHC

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Demetrios was one of those amazing, charismatic, “larger than life” intellects who could “electrify” a room just by walking through the door. His ability to “connect” with audiences far beyond the world of scholarly research — and to appreciate the “human lives and heroic stories beyond the number-crunching” was unparalleled.

He led in “putting immigration scholarship on the map” — as an academic discipline, a ground-breaker in clinical legal education, and a basis for progressive migration and human rights policies in government and NGOs. Through his work at MPI, Carnegie, and other institutions, he used scholarship to spur and encourage practical “grass roots” reforms in our immigration system and, indeed, in the international migration system. Many leaders of today’s “New Due Process Army” can trace their “practical scholarly roots” to Demetrios’s inspiration and example!

Perhaps ironically, another recent posting on ImmigrationProf Blog points out how the Biden Administration has disturbingly and inexcusably failed to “cash in” on the full potential of the extraordinary growth in “applied migration scholarship” fueled by Demetrios, his long time friend and colleague former Immigration Commissioner Doris Meissner, MPI Executive Director Donald Kerwin, Jr., and other giants in the field.

Rather, the Biden Administration has veered far off-track on immigration, human rights, and social justice issues by placing politicos without immigration expertise and lacking both moral courage and belief in fundamental human values in charge of its flailing and failing immigration mess. In particular, these tone-deaf politicos have failed to “connect the dots” between immigrant justice and racial justice in America.

Not surprisingly, that has resulted in across the board failures, unfulfilled promises, and angry, disgruntled potential allies on meaningful reforms in both areas. This, in turn, has demoralized and turned off the younger, dynamic, diverse, progressive, expert immigration, human rights, and social justice leaders who are key to the future of the Democratic Party and the preservation of American democracy.

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2022/01/mpi-honors-the-life-of-dr-demetrios-papademetriou.html

Talk about a lose-lose-lose approach! And, I guarantee that it hasn’t garnered one vote of support from “hard-liners” and “naysayers” who continue to mindlessly and dishonestly babble about “open borders!”

I’m not exaggerating here. Yesterday, I was on (Zoom) panels in Houston and DC. Both audiences and fellow panelists were stunned and outraged by the betrayal of due process, good government, expertise, common sense, and human values demonstrated by Biden’s “Miller Lite” approach to asylum at the Southern Border, the intentional mistreatment of migrants of color, and Garland’s beyond dysfunctional and chronically unjust Immigration Courts!

Particular disgust was reserved for the Administration’s intentional, continued, cowardly abuse of Haitian migrants. That, actually says more about their attitude toward true racial justice than the promise to appoint a Black Woman to the Supremes.

Welcome and long overdue as the latter is, it isn’t going to change the result on any major issue before this version of the Supremes. By contrast, the Biden Administration’s anti-Haitian policies are actually harming, dehumanizing, endangering, and even potentially killing Black migrants every day! No wonder they want to “sweep truth under the rug.”

It’s exactly the type of “applied stupidity,” willful blindness, intentional cruelty, and disdain for common sense, humanity, facts, and relevant experience that Demetrios would have resisted!

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

01-29-22

THE SADNESS OF PROPHECY WITHOUT POWER: Two Years Ago, I Gave A Speech Warning Of The Consequences Of “1939 Germany” — Now, We’re In “Germany 1938” With 1939 Just An Election Away! — Moscow Mitch, Lindsey The Toad, Texas Ted & The Rest Of The GOP Fellow Travelers & Cultists Would Be Right At Home With Franz van Papen!

This morning, Joe Hagan wrote in The Hive For Vanity Fair:

On the latest episode of Inside the Hive, former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens described the GOP under Donald Trump as a party of cynics, stooges, racists, and obsequious enablers whose profiles in cowardice bear an uncomfortable resemblance to 1930s Germany. “When I talk to Republican politicians, I hear Franz von Papen,” he says, referencing the German chancellor who convinced Germans that so-called radical leftists were a far greater threat than Adolf Hitler. “They all know that Trump is an idiot. They all know that he’s uniquely unqualified to be president. But they convinced themselves that he was a necessity.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/09/ex-republican-strategist-surveys-the-wreckage-of-trumps-gop

All too disturbingly true. For those who didn‘t notice, the GOP now has no platform. None! They are nakedly running on lies, racism, fear, White Supremacy, hate, misogyny, xenophobia, intentionally false narratives, anti-science, anti-intellectualism, and corruption. Sound familiar? It should to those of us who studied Modern European History and World War II.

Two years ago, before the International Association of Refugee & Migration Judges meeting at Georgetown Law, fresh from a visit to the Holocaust Museum in DC, I gave a speech warning of a return to “Eve of the Holocaust thinking.”

It was, of course, “extreme hubris and total self-delusion” to think anyone was paying attention. Nevertheless, it doesn’t lessen my “extreme sadness” of watching the disintegration of our nation, without being able to prevent it.

Here’s a “reprint” of that speech from the Summer of 2018:

JUST SAY NO TO 1939: HOW JUDGES CAN SAVE LIVES, UPHOLD THE CONVENTION, AND MAINTAIN INTEGRITY IN THE AGE OF OVERT GOVERNMENTAL BIAS TOWARD REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS

IMPLICIT BIAS IARMJ 08-03-18

JUST SAY NO TO 1939: HOW JUDGES CAN SAVE LIVES, UPHOLD THE CONVENTION, AND MAINTAIN INTEGRITY IN THE AGE OF OVERT GOVERNMENTAL BIAS TOWARD REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS

By Paul Wickham Schmidt,

U.S. Immigration Judge, Retired

Americas Conference

International Association of Refugee & Migration Judges

Georgetown Law

August 4, 2018

INTRODUCTION

Good afternoon. I am pleased to be here. Some twenty years ago, along with then Chief U.S. Immigration Judge Michael J. Creppy, I helped found this Association, in Warsaw. I believe that I’m the only “survivor” of that illustrious group of “Original Charter Signers” present today. And, whoever now has possession of that sacred Charter can attest that my signature today remains exactly as it was then, boldly scrawling over those of my colleagues and the last paragraph of the document.

As the Americas’ Chapter Vice President, welcome and thank you for coming, supporting, and contributing to our organization and this great conference. I also welcome you to the beautiful campus of Georgetown Law where I am on the adjunct faculty.

I thank Dean Treanor; my long-time friend and colleague Professor Andy Schoenholtz, and all the other wonderful members of our Georgetown family; the IARMJ; Associate Director Jennifer Higgins, Dimple Dhabalia, and the rest of their team at USCIS; and, of course, our Americas President Justice Russell Zinn and the amazing Ross Patee from the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board who have been so supportive and worked so hard to make this conference a success.

I recognize that this is the coveted “immediately after lunch slot” when folks might rather be taking a nap. But, as the American country singer Toby Keith would say “It’s me, baby, with you wake up call!” In other words, I’m going to give you a glimpse into the “parallel universe” being operted in the United States.

In the past, at this point I would give my comprehensive disclaimer. Now that I’m retired, I can skip that part. But, I do want to “hold harmless” both the Association and Georgetown for my remarks. The views I express this afternoon are mine, and mine alone. I’m going to tell you exactly what I think. No “party line,” no “bureaucratic doublespeak,” so “sugar coating.” Just the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we don’t have an implicit bias problem in the U.S. asylum adjudication system. The bad news: The bias is now, unfortunately, quite explicit.

Here’s a quote about refugees: “I guarantee you they are bad. They are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people.”

Here’s another one: “We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order.”

Here’s another referencing the presence of an estimated 11 million undocumented residents of the U.S.: “Over the last 30 years, there have been many reasons for this failure. I’d like to talk about just one—the fraud and abuse in our asylum system.”

Here’s yet another: “We’ve had situations in which a person comes to the United States and says they are a victim of domestic violence, therefore they are entitled to enter the United States. Well, that’s obviously false but some judges have gone along with that.”

You might think that these anti-asylum, and in many cases anti-Latino, anti-female, anti-child, anti-asylum seeker, de-humanizing statements were made by members of some fringe, xenophobic group. But no, the first two are from our President; the second two are from our Attorney General.

These are the very officials who should be insuring that the life-saving humanitarian protection purposes of the Refugee Act of 1980 and the Convention Against Torture are fully carried out and that our country fully complies with the letter and spirit of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees which is binding on our country under the 1967 Protocol.

Let me read you a quote that I published yesterday on my blog, immigrationcourtside.com, from a young civil servant resigning their position with “EOIR,” otherwise known as our Immigration Court system, or, alternatively, as the sad little donkey from Winnie the Pooh.

I was born and raised in a country that bears an indelible and shameful scar—the birth and spreading of fascism. An ideology that, through its different permutations, almost brought the world as we know it to an end. Sadly, history has taught me that good countries do bad things—sometimes indescribably atrocious things. So, I have very little tolerance for authoritarianism, extremism, and unilateral and undemocratic usurpations of Constitutional rights. I believe that DOJ-EOIR’s plan to implement individual annual numerical performance measures—i.e., quotas—on Immigration Judges violates the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, and the DOJ’s own mission to “ensure the fair and impartial administration of justice.” This is not the job I signed up for. I strongly believe in the positive value of government, and that the legitimacy of our agency—and any other governmental institution for that matter—is given by “the People’s” belief in its integrity, fairness, and commitment to serve “the People.” But when the government, with its unparalleled might and coercive force, infringes on constitutionally enshrined rights, I only have two choices: (1) to become complicitous in what I believe is a flagrant constitutional violation, or (2) to resign and to hold the government accountable as a private citizen. I choose to resign because I cannot in good conscience continue serving my country within EOIR.

Strong words, my friends. But, words that are absolutely indicative of the travesty of justice unfolding daily in the U.S. Immigration Courts, particularly with respect to women, children, and other asylum seekers –- the most vulnerable among us. Indeed, the conspicuous absence from this conference of anyone currently serving as a judge in the U.S. Immigration Courts tells you all you really need to know about what’s happening in today’s U.S. justice system.

Today, as we meet to thoughtfully discuss how to save refugees, the reality is that U.S. Government officials are working feverishly at the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice on plans to end the U.S. refugee and asylum programs as we know them and to reduce U.S. legal immigration to about “zero.”

Sadly, the U.S. is not alone in these high-level attacks on the very foundations of our Convention and international protection. National leaders in Europe and other so-called “liberal democracies” — who appear to have erased the forces and circumstances that led to World War II and its aftermath from their collective memory banks — have made similar statements deriding the influence of immigrants and the arrival of desperate asylum seekers. In short, here and elsewhere our Convention and our entire international protection system are under attacks unprecedented during my career of more than four decades in the area of immigration and refugee protection.

As a result, judges and adjudicators throughout the world, like you, are under extreme pressure to narrow interpretations, expedite hearings, view asylum seekers in a negative manner, and produce more denials of protection.

So, how do we as adjudicators remain loyal to the principles of our Convention and retain our own integrity under such pressures? And, more to the point, what can I, as someone no longer involved in the day-to-day fray, contribute to you and this conference?

Of course, you could always do what I did — retire and fulfill a longtime dream of becoming an internet “gonzo journalist.” But, I recognize that not everyone is in a position to do that.

Moreover, if all the “good guys” who believe in our Convention, human rights, human dignity, and fair process leave the scene, who will be left to vindicate the rights of refugees and asylum seekers to protection? Certainly not the political folks who are nominally in charge of the protection system in the US and elsewhere.

So, this afternoon, I’m returning to that which brought this Association together two decades ago in Warsaw: our united commitment to the letter and spirit of the 1951 Convention; additionally, our commitment to fairness, education, international approaches, group problem solving, promoting best practices, and mutual support.

In the balance of my presentation, I’m going to tell you four things, taken from our Convention, that I hope will help you survive, prosper, and advance the aims of our Convention in an age of nationalist, anti-refugee, anti-asylum, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

BODY

Protect, Don’t Reject

First, “protect, don’t reject.” Our noble Convention was inspired by the horrors of World War II and its aftermath. Many of you will have a chance to see this first hand at the Holocaust Museum.

Our Convention is a solemn commitment not to repeat disgraceful incidents such as the vessel St. Louis, which has also been memorialized in that Museum. For those of you who don’t know, in 1939 just prior to the outbreak of World War II a ship of German Jewish refugees unsuccessfully sought refuge in Cuba, the United States, and Canada, only to be rejected for some of the same spurious and racist reasons we now hear on a regular basis used to describe, deride, and de-humanize refugees. As a result, they were forced to return to Europe on the eve of World War II, where hundreds who should and could have been saved instead perished in the Holocaust that followed.

Since the beginning of our Convention, the UNHCR has urged signatory countries to implement and carry out “a generous asylum policy!” Beyond that, paragraphs 26 and 27 of the UN Handbookreiterate “Recommendation E” of the Convention delegates. This is the hope that Convention refugee protections will be extended to those in flight who might not fully satisfy all of the technical requirements of the “refugee” definition.

Therefore, I call on each of you to be constantly looking for legitimate ways in which to extend, rather than restrict, the life-saving protections offered by our Convention.

Give The “Benefit Of The Doubt”

Second, “give the benefit of the doubt.” Throughout our Convention, there is a consistent theme of recognizing the difficult, often desperate, situation of refugees and asylum seekers and attendant difficulties in proof, recollection, and presentation of claims. Therefore, our Convention exhorts us in at least four separate paragraphs, to give the applicant “the benefit of the doubt” in assessing and adjudicating claims.

As a sitting judge, I found that this, along with the intentionally generous “well-founded fear” standard, enunciated in the “refugee” definition and reinforced in 1987 by the U.S. Supreme Court and early decisions of our Board of Immigration Appeals implementing the Supreme Court’s directive, often tipped the balance in favor of asylum seekers in “close cases.”

Don’t Blame The Victims

Third, “don’t blame the victims.” The purpose of our Convention is to protect victims of persecution, not to blame them for all societal ills, real and fabricated, that face a receiving signatory country. Too much of today’s heated rhetoric characterizes legitimate asylum seekers and their families as threats to the security, welfare, heath, and stability of some of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, based on scant to non-existent evidence and xenophobic myths.

In my experience, nobody really wants to be a refugee. Almost everyone would prefer living a peaceful, productive stable life in their country of nationality. But, for reasons beyond the refugee’s control, that is not always possible.

Yes, there are some instances of asylum fraud. But, my experience has been that our DHS does an excellent job of ferreting out, prosecuting, and taking down the major fraud operations. And, they seldom, if ever, involve the types of claims we’re now seeing at our Southern Border.

I’m also aware that receiving significant numbers of refugee claimants over a relatively short period of time can place burdens on receiving countries. But, the answer certainly is not to blame the desperate individuals fleeing for their lives and their often pro bono advocates!

The answer set forth in our Convention is for signatory countries to work together and with the UNHCR to address the issues that are causing refugee flows and to cooperate in distributing refugee populations and in achieving generous uniform interpretations of the Convention to discourage “forum shopping.” Clearly, cranking up denials, using inhumane and unnecessary detention, stirring up xenophobic fervor, and limiting or blocking proper access to the refugee and asylum adjudication system are neither appropriate nor effective solutions under our Convention.

Give Detailed, Well-Reasoned, Individualized Decisions

Fourth, and finally, “give detailed, well-reasoned, individualized decisions.” These are the types of decisions encouraged by our Convention and to promote which our Association was formed. Avoid stereotypes and generalities based on national origin; avoid personal judgments on the decision to flee or seek asylum; avoid political statements; be able to explain your decision in legally sufficient, yet plainly understandable terms to the applicant, and where necessary, to the national government.

Most of all, treat refugee and asylum applicants with impartiality and the uniform respect, sensitivity, and fairness to which each is entitled, regardless of whether or not their claim under our Convention succeeds.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I fully recognize that times are tough in the “refugee world.” Indeed, as I tell my Georgetown students, each morning when I wake up, I’m thankful for two things: first, that I woke up, never a given at my age; second, that I’m not a refugee.

But, I submit that tough times are exactly when great, independent, and courageous judging and adjudication are necessary to protect both applicants from harm and governments from doing unwise and sometimes illegal and immoral things that they will later regret.

I have offered you four fairly straightforward ways in which adhering to the spirit of our Convention can help you, as judges and adjudicators, retain integrity while complying with the law: protect, don’t reject; give the benefit of the doubt; don’t blame the victims; and give detailed, well-reasoned, individualized decisions.

Hopefully, these suggestions will also insure that all of you will still be around and employed for our next conference.

Thanks for listening, have a great rest of our conference, and do great things! May Due Process and the spirit of our noble Convention and our great organization guide you every day in your work and in your personal life! Due Process forever!

(08-06-18)

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In addition to the Moscow Mitches, Grahams, and other corrupt GOP pols who have sold out our nation, the disgraceful performance of Chief Justice John Roberts and his GOP colleagues in the face of the regime’s overtly racist, White Nationalist, deadly abuses of asylum seekers in violation of the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Constitution, the Refugee Act of 1980 (b/t/w, ignored and abrogated, but never repealed), the Geneva Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol, and the Convention Against Torture will fit well within the “Judicial Aid and Complicity Section” of the future “Museum Honoring Victims of Crimes Against Humanity Committed By The Trump Regime.”

The Constitution is remarkably clear: All “persons” within the jurisdiction of the U.S. are entitled to due process and equal protection under our laws. Unquestionably, refugees seeking legal protection within our court system, some actually being detained, deported, or forced to relocate by our Government, are within our jurisdiction. An L1 law student knows that! It’s not rocket science!

So, the only way that the Supremes’ majority could abrogate legally required protections is through intentionally disingenuous “legal mumbo jumbo and gobbledygook” and ridiculous “legal fictions” that, at heart, convert refugees and migrants of color into “non-persons” under the law. Similar to their approach to the voting rights of African Americans and Latinos.

That’s how you abandon your duties to your fellow human beings and tank on your Constitutional oaths. Sounds pretty overtly racist to me. And, I must say, it sounds pretty racist to most lawyers who understand immigration and human rights laws.

Too bad and too late for those deserving justice and protection, men, women, children, members of the LGBTQ community, religious and political activists, most highly vulnerable and semi-defenseless in the face of lawless tyranny, whose lives have been sacrificed or ruined forever by lousy, ideological, tone-deaf, anti-human-dignity judging.

It’s too late for them. But, it’s not too late for America to turn away from 1939 and advance to a better 2021 with a commitment to making “equal justice for all” under the law a reality rather than a cruel, unfulfilled, bogus promise! That would at least honor the memory of the dead, tortured, raped, broken, mutilated, and ruined who have been unnecessarily sacrificed by the GOP and their complicit judges who failed in their duties to our Constitution and to humanity.

We can’t change yesterday. But, we can stop repeating its mistakes!

PWS

09-11-20

🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️🤮👎🏻🤡HOW THE GOP SOLD OUT AMERICA TO RACISM & MALICIOUS INCOMPETENCE: “Trump’s incoherence, his temper, his impulsiveness, his breathtaking ignorance — all of it was well-known among the top tiers of the Republican machinery. But for them, it was simply a challenge to overcome, another hurdle that fate had placed between them and their holy grail of judges and tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. Not once did I ever hear any concern that just maybe they were working to install a useful idiot who truly was an idiot, with absolutely zero leadership qualities one ordinarily looks for in someone aspiring to become the chief executive of the world’s remaining superpower.”

Trump Clown — Donald J. Trump
Famous American Clown
(Officially titled “Ass Clown”)
Artist: Scott Scheidly
Orlando, FL
Reproduced by permission

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-useful-idiot-book_n_5f4bf594c5b697186e379058

The following is excerpted from “The Useful Idiot: How Donald Trump Killed the Republican Party with Racism and the Rest of Us with Coronavirus,” by S.V. Dáte.

A pandemic never occurred to them. The idea that Donald Trump would ever be required to sit still, pay attention and make rational decisions that would determine whether hundreds of thousands of Americans would live or die not once crossed the minds of those who put him into the Oval Office.

Oh, they all had their various reasons for wanting him there. For white evangelical Christians, he had explicitly promised to appoint the federal judges they had so longed for to turn back the nation’s cultural clock. For Mitch McConnell, a Trump win — as unlikely as it seemed — was the only real path to making sure Republicans retained control of the Senate and he himself remained majority leader. And for Vladimir Putin, having Trump in the White House — as unlikely as it seemed — would be a dream come true, an opportunity to wreak havoc on his longtime adversary and weaken its historic alliance with Western Europe.

Russia’s dictator, of course, was not remotely interested in what Trump’s ascension might mean for Americans in the event of an actual calamity. If they were dumb enough to vote for him, well, they deserved whatever they got. In any event, it was not his problem.

As for Trump’s American supporters, perhaps so much time had passed since Sept. 11, 2001, that the idea of a genuine national emergency was but a faded memory. Perhaps the quiet competence that President Barack Obama’s team had employed with the 2009 flu pandemic and later with the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak had diminished the perceived threat that a simple virus could present.

For whatever reason, even as they watched the noise and chaos and nonsense generated by candidate Trump for a full year and a half, the consequences of a real crisis requiring real leadership actually happening on the watch of a President Trump had never really dawned on them.

True, there existed then — and continues to exist today — a significant cadre of Republican voters who genuinely believed that the Trump they watched on “The Apprentice” was the real Donald Trump. That he was a real billionaire, based on his own efforts and smarts. That he was capable of making rational, quality decisions based on the facts presented to him.

That excuse, though, does not work for those Republicans from McConnell on down to the congressional candidates who had occasion to speak with Trump in person. As one top Republican National Committee member told me after his first face-to-face encounter with Trump two months before the 2016 election: “OK. Our guy is insane.”

His was not a minority view, by the way. Trump’s incoherence, his temper, his impulsiveness, his breathtaking ignorance — all of it was well-known among the top tiers of the Republican machinery. But for them, it was simply a challenge to overcome, another hurdle that fate had placed between them and their holy grail of judges and tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. Not once did I ever hear any concern that just maybe they were working to install a useful idiot who truly was an idiot, with absolutely zero leadership qualities one ordinarily looks for in someone aspiring to become the chief executive of the world’s remaining superpower.

It was an abject failure of the Republican Party’s responsibility to the country. In our two-party system, both have a duty to weed out candidates who fail the threshold test of commander-in-chief and, relatedly, emergency-manager-in-chief. Through the summer and fall of 2015 and then the early nominating contests of 2016, it was clear as day that Trump was not credible in those roles, and yet neither the remaining candidates nor the party leadership made a serious effort to ensure his defeat.

True, there were some who voiced warnings. Jeb Bush called Trump a “chaos candidate” who would bring us a “chaos presidency.” But there was also Ted Cruz, who literally praised Trump for the better part of a year, refusing to criticize him in the hopes of one day inheriting his voters. By the time Cruz did unload on him, it was seen as sour grapes. Such was the cynicism and game-playing that put us where we are.

. . . .

****************
Read the full article at the link.

It’s what happens when immoral and unprincipled GOP politicos can’t tell the difference between a “useful idiot” and a “total blithering (racist) idiot.”

“It was an abject failure of the Republican Party’s responsibility to the country.” As usual, it’s left for the Dems and the majority of us to clean up the the GOP’s disgraceful (and fundamentally un-American) mess! That’s why in addition to expelling the “Clown Prince” it’s essential to remove the GOP and “Moscow Mitch” from their abusive and destructive control of the Senate!

Check out this page from “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson:

“Caste” Isabel Wilkerson — “Caste”
By Isabel Wilkerson
Random House

Sound familiar? It should! Trumpism and Nazism share a common “core strategy:” Racism based on “dehumanization” of “the other” before the law — otherwise known as “Dred Scottification.” It’s in full operation by the Trump regime. And, most shockingly, a majority of our Supremes have “gone along to get along!” Very similar to the cowardly, complicit, and ultimately disastrous and deadly performance of the German judiciary in the face of Hitler’s racism!

There is no excuse for Trump, and there is no way that our our democratic republic can withstand another four years of his lies, bias, racism, “breathtaking ignorance,” corruption, cowardice, bullying, and “malicious incompetence!”

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

PWS

09-06-20

🏴‍☠️☠️⚰️🤮👎🏻THE GOP HAS A PLAN FOR YOU: “plunder, theft and extraction!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/25/opinion/trump-convention-platform.html

Jamelle Bouie in The NY Times:

. . . .

It is not news that the Republican Party has a stagnant governing agenda cobbled together from the long-discredited dogmas and shibboleths of the conservative movement. “The current iteration of the G.O.P. is indifferent to the substance of government,” Steve Benen, a political writer and producer for The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, writes in “The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics”:

It is disdainful of expertise and analysis. It is hostile toward evidence and arithmetic. It is tethered to few, if any, meaningful policy preferences. It does not know, and does not care, about how competing proposals should be crafted, scrutinized or implemented.

What is news is the extent to which the Republican Party has embraced the trappings of its leader, which is to say, the trappings of a right-wing cable news network: a nonstop parade of conspiracy, demagogy and grievance, in service to a cult of personality, all for the sake of a politics of plunder, theft and extraction.

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

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

Pretty good explanation of The Party of Trump (formerly known as “The Party of Lincoln”).

My question is why the so-called “mainstream media” (excluding Jamelle and a few others) handles with “kid gloves” folks like Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Melania, who go on national TV and present knowingly bogus, totally disingenuous, fabricated portraits of Trump as a benign presence in U.S. politics. In a vain, continuing search for “normalization” of overt 21st century Jim Crow nationalist fascism, the “mainstreams” appear ready to credit speaking in complete, largely grammatical, sentences in the English language and not screaming racist tropes or absurdist internet conspiracy theories as all that is necessary to be considered “credible” and a “moderating force” in today’s “Trumpized” GOP!

The disingenuous treatment by the “mainstreams” of dishonest attempts to “soften” Trump’s true “Mini-Mussolini” persona as election-season gimmick is a gross dis-service to the public welfare and the abdication of the duty of courageous independent journalism to provide critical coverage — not just regurgitate RNC propaganda!

Why are “the mainstreams” rolling over for the RNC?

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

PWS

08-26-20

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

Paul,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outraged? Here are two ways to take action today:

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

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

Onward,

Margaret Huang
SPLC President & CEO

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

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

· No platform

· No values

· No truth

· No humanity

· No decency

· No America

· No inclusion

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

Sure “Sounds Like Hate” to me!

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

PWS

08-25-20

COURTSIDE GUEST COLUMNIST: ANNA PATCHIN SCHMIDT — “2020 End of School Year Roundup From Beloit, WI”

2020 End of School Year Roundup From Beloit, Wisconsin

By Anna Patchin Schmidt

Courtside Exclusive

June 5, 2020. I almost couldn’t pull this off this year due to the realities of quarantine life. But here are my annual end-of-the-year reflections on education (and life)!

It has been a tumultuous school year in Beloit. We saw yet another superintendent come and go, but not before sustaining damage from his abusive leadership style and warped priorities. For a while the anonymous facebook profile “Jane Smith” stole our attention with a series of fascinating social media exposés. An election that coincided with a stay-at-home order and a brazen disregard for life and democratic values by state lawmakers, did at least result in some refreshing new faces on the school board. Meanwhile, a so-called “public” charter school has used the chance to sneak into town and garner support by exploiting the fears of white parents and the frustrations of parents of color.

And yet amidst the chaos and uncertainty of distance learning during a global pandemic, I actually think that we are in a better position than ever. Indeed, our current explosive national climate should be a wake up call that results in a renewed commitment to public education and a heightened awareness of its vital role in communities.

Earlier this year, long before the trauma induced by Covid-19 and George Floyd’s murder, I noticed a troubling narrative reflected in many conversations: “The School District of Beloit USED TO BE great,” or similarly, “The School District of Beloit is not the right place for my child ANYMORE.” Only now, in light of recent events, do I better understand what this narrative means. I can’t help but think that its unspoken truth is: “We never USED TO have to talk about race. We USED TO be able to push all this under the rug.”

If we are really serious about dismantling racism, as so many claim to be, then we need to get serious about supporting public schools. No doubt the public schools have a long-standing history of perpetuating systemic racism and oppression. I’m hardly suggesting that we ignore or accept the status quo. On the contrary, we still need the reforms inspired by activists that help our schools function better and thus serve all members of the community. This kind of activism could take many forms, including standing up to a corrupt school board member, pushing for teacher training on equity and trauma-informed instruction, promoting fair and representative hiring practices, or raising concerns about how bias influences individual and district-wide policies resulting in a disproportionate effect.

But instead of contributing towards positive change, many people opt out of public schools with the following justifications:

-“We are looking for a more rigorous curriculum.”

-“I’m concerned about all the behavior problems in public schools.”

-“I don’t think I should have to sacrifice my own child to make a political statement.”

-“We had a really bad experience with a teacher or principal.”

-“The school district doesn’t meet the individual needs of MY child.”

These types of explanations may not be racist in intent but, nevertheless, the results of these decisions do reinforce inequity. There are easy outs and self-serving options (for those few who have the resources to make these choices), but they do not hold up for those who are serious about being anti-racist. Private schools and charter schools will always be selective about who and how many students they serve. They continue to siphon funds away from public schools that desperately need them and their profit and successes are paid for by the struggle of others. We all live with a fair amount of hypocrisy in our lives. But the discrepancy between sharing black lives matter memes and then opting out of public school is just too much for me.

When I reflect on the sentiment that Beloit schools “used to be great,” I can’t help but think about the huge number of people marching at Horace White Park last Sunday, many of whom were our students. Their presence, their courage, and their sense of purpose is, for me, a marker of success and greatness and I’m proud to support them. While there are a growing number of fears I have for my own children as they grow up in this world, the value of their education in the School District of Beloit isn’t one of them.

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

Anna Patchin Schmidt is a High School English teacher in the Public Schools of Beloit, Wisconsin, where she lives with her husband, Professor Daniel Barolsky, and their three children Oscar, Eve, and Atticus, all of whom attend a bilingual program at Todd Elementary School, a Beloit Public School. Anna holds a B.A. and a B.Mus., both with honors, from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin where she was also a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She received her M.A. in Education from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She is also certified to teach English Language Learning and did so in the Menasha and Walworth, Wisconsin Public School Systems before joining the Beloit System. She and Daniel are dedicated members of the “Beloit Proud” Movement, and she is also a qualified Doula who has assisted in the delivery of several babies. Anna grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, where she attended Alexandria City Public Schools (as did her brothers, Wick & Will) and graduated from T.C. Williams High School (“Remember the Titans”) with honors, earning 12 varsity letters, rowing on several championship crew teams, and playing oboe in the T.C. Williams Band. She is our daughter.

PWS

06-05-20

PAUL KRUGMAN: WE MUST CALL OUT TRUMP’S EVIL MOTIVES: “When you’re confronting bad-faith arguments, the public should be informed not just these arguments are wrong, but they they are in fact being made in bad faith. . . . Trump has assembled an Administration of the worst and the dimmest.” — I/O/W “A Kakistocracy”

Charles Kaiser
American Author, Journalist, Academic Administrator

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/arguing-with-zombies-review-paul-krugman-trump-republicans?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Charles Kaiser writes about Krugman in The Guardian:

The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has four essential rules for successful punditry:

Stay with the easy stuff

Write in English

Be honest about dishonesty

Don’t be afraid to talk about motives

Active Measures review: how Trump gave Russia its richest target yet

Those maxims have consistently made Krugman the most intelligent and the most useful New York Times pundit, at least since Frank Rich wrote his final must-read column 11 years ago. A new collection of Krugman’s pieces, therefore, is a timely reminder that actual knowledge and ordinary common sense are two of the rarest qualities in mainstream journalism today.

Krugman’s enemies are the “zombie ideas” of his book’s title, especially the belief that budget deficits are always bad and the notion that tax cuts for the rich can ever benefit anyone other than the plutocrats who never stop pleading for them.

The same tired arguments in favor of coddling the rich have been rolled out over and over again, by Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, even though there has never been a shred of serious evidence to support them.

These relentless efforts over five decades culminated in the Trump tax cut, memorably described by the political consultant Rick Wilson as a masterwork of “gigantic government giveaways, unfunded spending, massive debt and deficits, and a catalogue of crony capitalist freebies”.

Wilson also identified the billionaires’ effect on the nation’s capital. Washington, he wrote, has become “the drug-resistant syphilis of political climates, largely impervious to treatment and highly contagious”.

Krugman’s columns act like a steady stream of antibiotics, aimed at restoring the importance of the economic sciences that have been so successfully displaced by brain-dead Republican ideology.

Very few political columns are worth reading 12 months after they are written – the New York Times grandee James Reston accurately titled one of his collections Sketches in the Sand. But Krugman’s book proves that he, a Nobel-prize winning economist, shares two rare qualities with George Orwell, the novelist who also wrote much of the best journalism of the 20th century: deep intelligence and genuine prescience.

The modern GOP doesn’t want to hear from serious economists, whatever their politics. It prefers charlatans and cranks

Krugman is at his Orwellian best here: “When you’re confronting bad-faith arguments, the public should be informed not just these arguments are wrong, but they they are in fact being made in bad faith.”

It’s “important to point out that the people who predicted runaway inflation from the Fed’s bond buying were wrong. But it’s also important to point out that none of them have been willing to admit that they were wrong.”

Krugman also writes that “even asking the right questions like ‘what is happening to income inequality’” will spur quite a few conservatives to “denounce you as un-American”. And it’s worse for climate scientists, who face persecution for speaking the truth about our continued dependence on fossil fuels, or social scientists studying the causes of gun violence: “From 1996 to 2017 the Centers for Disease Control were literally forbidden to fund research into firearm injuries and deaths.”

The history of the last half-century is mostly about how the unbridled greed of the top 1% has perverted American democracy so successfully, it has become almost impossible to implement rational policies that benefit a majority of Americans.

To Krugman, an “interlocking network of media organizations and think tanks that serves the interests of rightwing billionaires” has “effectively taken over the GOP” and “movement ‘conservatism’ is what keeps zombie ideas, like belief in the magic of tax cuts, alive.

“It’s not just that Trump has assembled an administration of the worst and the dimmest. The truth is that the modern GOP doesn’t want to hear from serious economists, whatever their politics. It prefers charlatans and cranks, who are its kind of people.”

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article at the link.

Hopefully, Joe Biden has Krugman and others like him on “speed dial.” He’s going to need lots of help and ideas from “the best and the brightest” to undo the damage inflicted by the Trump kakistocracy and Moscow Mitch.

And, the “best and the brightest” should also be the plan for rebuilding an independent Immigration Judiciary and the Article III Judiciary. The severe damage inflicted by Trump, Mitch, and the White Nationalists can’t be undone overnight, but “gotta start building for a better future somewhere.”

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

PWS

05-03-20

THANK UW LAW: Unemployment Insurance Was The Brainchild of Two Amazing UW Law Students Who Were Also In Love — It All Began In L-1 Torts! — PLUS: The “Wisconsin Idea” Continues Today Through The Work of Professor Erin Barbato!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/18/unemployment-checks-great-depression-coronavirus/h

Michael S. Rosenwald writes in the WashPost:

A line to apply for unemployment benefits in San Francisco in 1938. (Library of Congress)

They first laid eyes on each other in torts class.

It was 1923, a period of prosperity before the Great Depression.

He was the son of Walter Rauschenbusch, a prominent theologian and key figure in the Social Gospel movement. She was the daughter of Louis Brandeis, the progressive Supreme Court justice and the most famous Jew in America. Each inherited their parents’ zeal for social justice.

At the University of Wisconsin Law School, these two idealists — Elizabeth Brandeis and Paul Raushenbush — noticed each other immediately. She was brainy and shy, her hair long and dark. He was handsome and outgoing. On hikes and canoe outings, they fell in love romantically and intellectually — a partnership instrumental in passing the nation’s first unemployment compensation law.

The story of how they did it is largely forgotten, but the 22 million people who have applied for unemployment during the coronavirus pandemic — and, of course, the millions before them — have this unlikely couple to thank. The law they conceived of and helped pass in Wisconsin laid the foundation for unemployment insurance throughout the country.

“Their story is absolutely staggering to think about right now,” said their grandson Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, a Baptist minister and senior adviser for public affairs and innovation at Interfaith Youth Core, a nonprofit organization. “It was their life’s work to make laws like this available to everyone.”

Raushenbush, who lives in New York, has spent the last few years writing a history of his family, including interviewing his father, Walter, who is 92 and lives in McLean, Va. Raushenbush was working on the unemployment insurance section as the coronavirus pandemic arrived in America.

Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush and Paul Raushenbush. (Courtesy of Paul Brandeis Raushenbush)

As part of his research, Raushenbush has been reading a privately published book his grandparents wrote based on interviews they gave to a Columbia University oral history project. The book is the story of the legislation — where the idea came from, the characters involved, how the law was ultimately passed.

“It really reads like a novel,” Raushenbush said.

The main characters, of course, are his grandparents.

And Wisconsin.

His grandmother moved there to attend law school. She had lost her job as a researcher for the D.C. Minimum Wage Board following the Supreme Court’s ruling that the minimum wage for women was unconstitutional. Justice Brandeis, who as a lawyer and jurist was renowned for his progressive stance on social issues, did not cast a vote because of his daughter’s job.

E.B., as she was known to family and friends, wanted a career at the intersection of economics, labor and the law. She hoped to attend an elite East Coast law school, but those programs, including Harvard, where her father studied, didn’t accept women. With her father’s approval, she chose the University of Wisconsin, where the “Wisconsin Idea” — fusing academic research to solving social problems — was flourishing.

“I have no doubt that the Wisconsin Law School is good enough for your purposes,” E.B.’s father wrote to her, “and should think it probable that you would find economics instruction, and doubtless, other considerations more sympathetic there than at Yale.”

Her future husband chose Wisconsin for the same reason. There, the couple studied under professor John R. Commons, an influential social economist who crafted Wisconsin’s workers’ compensation law. Commons tried and failed several times to pass legislation protecting unemployed workers, whose numbers were soaring, especially after the stock market crash in 1929.

Paul Raushenbush signing the paperwork for the first unemployment compensation check in 1936. (Courtesy of Paul Brandeis Raushenbush)

Commons took a particular interest in his graduate students, inviting them for regular dinners on Friday nights to discuss societal problems.

“I suppose the characteristic thing about Commons was that he was trying to use his brains and enlist the brains of his students in attempting solutions of economic problems,” Raushenbush said during the Columbia University oral history interviews. “This was no ivory tower guy. Sure, he did research and wrote books, but perhaps the main interest that attracted his students was that they were being invited to participate in an attempt to deal with difficult problems on an intelligent basis.”

By 1930, E.B. and her husband both were teaching economics at the University of Wisconsin. They had become friends with Philip La Follette, the local district attorney, whose parents were friends with Justice Brandeis. One day in June, La Follette invited the couple, along with another Wisconsin economist, Harold Groves, to his house in Madison.

La Follette told them he planned to run for governor, that he planned to win, and that he wanted to pass legislation instituting unemployment compensation. He asked the trio to come up with a plan.

And did they ever.

They spent the weekend hiking along the Wisconsin River batting around ideas. Their key idea — one that survives today — was that the benefits should be funded entirely by employers, thus giving them the incentive to maintain steady levels of employment or bear the cost of not doing so. The economists also decided that Groves, who grew up on a Wisconsin farm, should run for the State Assembly and introduce the legislation.

Everything clicked.

In 1932, Wisconsin Gov. Philip La Follette signs the nation’s first unemployment measure into law. Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush and Paul Raushenbush are second and third from the left. (Courtesy of Paul Brandeis Raushenbush)

The first unemployment check issued in Wisconsin. (Wisconsin Historical Society)

. . . .

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

Read the rest of the article in the WashPost at the link.

Scholarship, teamwork, creativity, hard work, and a healthy dose of romance produces results that are still “making a difference” today. Nice story! Beyond that, it’s an inspiring story for today’s world.

What if we had more folks like the Raushenbusches in government today? Folks looking for ways in which government could work to make the lives or ordinary working people better. Compare that with the “Trump Kakistocracy,” a bunch of self-centered incompetents mostly out to disable government, screw working folks, line their own pockets, glorify and suck up to their “Supreme Leader-Clown,” and shift blame for their mess, all while attempting to advance a destructive far-right political agenda that cares not for the public good! Then we had folks like Phil La Follette; now we have Stephen Miller!

Professor Walter Brandeis Raushenbusch, the son of Elizabeth & Paul, was on the faculty of U.W. Law when I was there from 1970-73. However, I never had him for a class. We did study the “LaFollette Era” and its contributions to President Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in several of my classes.

I believe that U.W. Law gave me a strong grounding in teamwork with my colleagues (now retired Wisconsin State Judge Thomas S. Lister was one), how to apply scholarship to achieve practical results, and solving complex problems.

Speaking with Judge Lister earlier this year during a “pre-lockdown” visit with his wife Sally to D.C., I could see how our time together at U.W. Law had a continuing profound influence on both of our careers, particularly the “judicial phases.” In our different ways, we were always striving to establish “best practices,” promote “good government,” and make the “system work better” for the public it served. Just like some of the “progressive ideas” that were interwoven with our legal education in Madison. “Teaching from the bench” was how I always thought of it. Sometimes we succeeded, other times not so much; but we were always “in there pitching,” even up to today. See, e.g., the “Lister-Schmidt Proposal” for an Auxiliary Judiciary for the U.S. Immigration Courts here: https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/08/19/an-open-letter-proposal-from-two-uw-law-73-retired-judges-weve-spent-90-collective-years-working-to-improve-the-quality-delivery-of-justice-in-america/. We haven’t given up on this one!

Hon. Thomas Lister
Retired Jackson County (WI) Circuit Judge

And, the “Wisconsin Idea” is still alive and thriving at U.W. Law, thanks to dedicated professors like my good friend and fellow warrior for the “New Due Process Army,” Professor Erin Barbato, Director of the U.W. Immigrant Justice Clinic. Erin uses creative scholarship, teaches practical, usable, courtroom and counseling skills, promotes teamwork, and saves “real lives” in her work with asylum seekers and other migrants. She is also a role model who is inspiring a new generation of American lawyers committed to advancing social justice and guaranteeing Due Process and fundamental fairness for all. Indeed, Erin was a guest lecturer at my Georgetown Law class and inspired my students with her courage, energy, and real life examples of “applying law to save lives!” It really made the “textbook come alive” for my students! Thanks for all you do, Erin!

Professor Erin Barbato
Director, Immigrant Justice Clinic
UW Law

On Wisconsin!

Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-19-20

U.S. DISTRICT JUDGE LYNN S. ADELMAN CHANNELS “COURTSIDE” — BLASTS ROBERTS & COMPANY FOR AIDING THE FORCES SEEKING TO DESTROY OUR DEMOCRACY — “Instead of doing what it can to ensure the maintenance of a robust democratic republic, the Court’s decisions ally it with the most anti-democratic currents in American politics,”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/11/lynn-adelman-roberts-trump/

Fred Barbash reports for the WashPost:

Lynn S. Adelman, a U.S. district judge in Milwaukee, has riled conservatives by publishing a blistering critique of the Supreme Court’s record under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., focusing on a string of decisions that he argues have fostered “economic inequality,” “undermined democracy” and “increased the political power of corporations and wealthy individuals” at the expense of ordinary Americans.

Adelman also criticized President Trump, who he wrote ran as a populist but failed to deliver “policies beneficial to the general public. … While Trump’s temperament is that of an autocrat,” Adelman wrote, “he is disinclined to buck the wealthy individuals and corporations who control his party.”

The article by Adelman was all the more unusual because it went after the chief justice directly. Roberts, he said, was “misleading” in his 2005 confirmation hearing testimony when he pledged to be a passive “umpire” calling balls and strikes.

Adelman called that metaphor a “masterpiece of disingenuousness,” saying the court under Roberts “has been anything but passive” as its “hard right majority” has actively participated in “undermining American democracy.”

As president, Donald Trump has repeatedly accused federal judges of being political and beholden to the presidents who appointed them. (JM Rieger/The Washington Post)

The article, entitled “The Roberts Court’s Assault on Democracy,” is scheduled for publication in an unspecified forthcoming issue of the Harvard Law & Policy Review, which describes itself as the official publication of the liberal American Constitution Society. It was published in full at SSRN this month.

Adelman, appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1997, is a former Democratic state senator in Wisconsin and Legal Aid Society trial lawyer. Perhaps his best-known decision nationally was a 2014 ruling striking down Wisconsin’s voter ID law.

His broad critique of the Roberts court, with particular reference to its decisions on voting rights and campaign finance by corporate interests, is not an uncommon one — coming, that is, from liberal scholars or political leaders, including former president Barack Obama.

But coming from a sitting federal judge in a journal article accompanied by such a blunt attack on Roberts, not to mention Trump, it has attracted uncommon attention.

. . . .

**********

Read the complete article at the link.

So I’m not the only one to note the Chiefie’s “Taneyesque” performance, particularly on issues involving the rights of migrants, refugees, Muslims, and other persons of color. He has joined the regime in “Dred Scottifying” those with brown skins who are entitled to the protection of our Constitution and our laws, which Trump has eliminated without legislation, relying largely on transparently fraudulent “national security rationales.”

But, Roberts hasn’t been much good for African Americans or other minorities either, joining his right winger activist colleagues in disingenuously dismantling key parts of civil rights and voting rights protections and turning an intentionally blind eye to partisan gerrymandering carried out by the GOP to disenfranchise minorities. Election results get skewed and folks actually die as a result of these intentional miscarriages of justice to further a toxic right wing agenda aimed at destroying America’s democratic institutions, promoting inequality, and institutionalizing privilege. As Judge Adelman said “the transformation of the Supreme Court from what he described as a defender of ordinary people and ‘subordinated groups’ to an enabler of an ‘anti-democratic’ Republican agenda.” Right on, Judge A!

I also found this comment telling:

Adelman was unapologetic. “I think it’s totally appropriate to criticize the court when there’s a basis for it,” he said. “Judges are encouraged to comment on the law because we have a particular interest, knowledge and familiarity.”

Compare that with the “muzzling” of the Immigration Judiciary by the Executive reported recently on Courtside. https://immigrationcourtside.com/2020/03/03/🤡🤡clown-court-report-as-due-process-goes-into-death-spiral-regime-muzzles-immigration-judges/

And, as I constantly point out, the Immigration Courts aren’t “courts” at all. They are blatantly unconstitutional “star chambers” run by the Executive Branch with the complicity of the Article III Judiciary who see their work daily and know full well that they are often “rubber stamping” final orders sending folks into potentially life-threatening exile with only a transparently thin veneer of “due process.” But, according to Roberts and his gang, brown-skinned refugees aren’t entitled to even access this process in a reasonable manner, let alone receive the fair hearings to which they are entitled before being “orbited” to potential death in foreign lands. What if it were his wife and kids? I’ll bet their lives would get more consideration.

I also appreciate Judge Adelman’s “spotlighting” the disingenuous testimony of Roberts and other right wingers under oath before the Senate when they “feigned impartiality” to disguise their anti-democracy agenda (without, of course, losing the support of the rightest Republicans who were “licking their chops” at finally getting their long-awaited “judicial wrecking crew” in place).

As one of my esteemed Round Table colleagues said recently: “In the words of Balzac, ‘to distrust the judiciary marks the beginning of the end of society.’”

Unhappily, thanks to Roberts and other complicit Article IIIs, we’re there. Which is exactly how Trump and his supporters want it!

In reality, judges were among those inside Germany who might have effectively challenged Hitler’s authority, the legitimacy of the Nazi regime, and the hundreds of laws that restricted political freedoms, civil rights, and guarantees of property and security. And yet, the overwhelming majority did not. Instead, over the 12 years of Nazi rule, during which time judges heard countless cases, most not only upheld the law but interpreted it in broad and far-reaching ways that facilitated, rather than hindered, the Nazis ability to carry out their agenda.

— United States Holocaust Museum, Law, Justice, and the Holocaust, at 8 (July 2018)

How soon we forget!

So much for the bogus ”passive “umpire” calling balls and strikes.”

Due Process Forever! Complicit Courts Never!

PWS

03-11-20

COMING ATTRACTIONS: ST MARY’S LAW REVIEW ON RACE & SOCIAL JUSTICE, & USTA INSTITUTE ON TEXAN CULTURES PRESENT THE 2020 IMMIGRATION SYMPOSIUM ON FEB. 28, 2020 IN SAN ANTONIO — Featuring Khizr Khan, Keynote Speaker; Ira J. Kurzbazn, Esquire, Guest Speaker; & A Host of Experts, Including Me!

My speech is entitled: “Due Process Doesn’t Live Here Any More: Weaponized Immigration Courts Are America’s Star Chambers”

Here is the complete program and registration information:

Symposium_Poster

Hope to see you in San Antonio.

Due Process Forever!

PWS

02-03-20

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 themselves lucky that Baez-Sanchez has not asked us to hold them in contempt, with all the consequences that possibility entails.” — Baez-Sanchez v. Barr — Chief “Perp” Billy Barr remains at large to inflict more wanton damage on our republic, our legal system, and the most vulnerable humans!

FULL DECISION:

http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/rssExec.pl?Submit=Display&Path=Y2020/D01-23/C:19-1642:J:Easterbrook:aut:T:fnOp:N:2462983:S:0

Baez-Sanchez v. Barr, 7th Cir., 01-23-20, published

PANEL: BAUER, EASTERBROOK, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

OPINION BY: Judge Easterbrook

KEY QUOTE:

What happened next beggars belief. The Board of Immigration Appeals wrote, on the basis of a footnote in a letter the Attorney General issued after our opinion, that our deci- sion is incorrect. Instead of addressing the issues we specified, the Board repeated a theme of its prior decision that the Secretary has the sole power to issue U visas and therefore should have the sole power to decide whether to waive in- admissibility. The Board did not rely on any statute, regulation, or reorganization plan transferring the waiver power under §1182(d)(3)(A)(ii) from the Attorney General to the Secretary. Nor did the Board discuss whether only aliens outside the United States may apply for relief under §1182(d)(3)(A)(ii). Likewise the Board did not consider whether Baez-Sanchez is entitled to a favorable exercise of whatever discretion the Attorney General retains. In sum, the Board flatly refused to implement our decision. Baez- Sanchez has filed a second petition for review.

We have never before encountered defiance of a remand order, and we hope never to see it again. Members of the Board must count themselves lucky that Baez-Sanchez has not asked us to hold them in contempt, with all the consequences that possibility entails.

The Board seemed to think that we had issued an advisory opinion, and that faced with a conflict between our views and those of the Attorney General it should follow the la]er. Yet it should not be necessary to remind the Board, all of whose members are lawyers, that the “judicial Power” under Article III of the Constitution is one to make conclusive deci- sions, not subject to disapproval or revision by another branch of government. See, e.g., Plaut v. Spendthrift Farm, Inc., 514 U.S. 211 (1995). We acted under a statutory grant of authority to review the Board’s decisions. 8 U.S.C. §1252(a)(1). Once we reached a conclusion, both the Constitution and the statute required the Board to implement it.

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

A NOTE TO THE 7TH CIRCUIT AND OTHER ARTICLE III JUDGES:

My sympathies to you.

But, frankly, rather than coming as a “shock,” you should know that similar stuff happens every day in our U.S. Immigration Courts, which are not “courts” by any known definition, do not provide fair and impartial decision makers, do not satisfy even minimal standards of Constitutional Due Process, and operate in a blatantly unconstitutional manner that you and your colleagues in other circuits and the Supremes have condoned for decades as it unfolded right under your noses. Contempt for the law, disregard of basic Due Process and fundamental fairness, bias against immigrants, particularly asylum seekers, rude treatment, disrespect for lawyers, contempt for the other coequal branches of Government, and failure to respect human decency and dignity are now among the “staples” of today’s “captive” Immigration Courts.

It’s just that most litigants don’t have the wherewithal and and access to competent lawyers to take their cases all the way to the Circuit Courts, sometimes several times as happened in this particular case, in a search for justice. They are, in very plain terms, simply railroaded out of the country without regard to the law or our Constitution.

Sadly, even when they do get before your colleagues across the country, far too many of them ignore the contemptuous travesty of justice being perpetrated by the Department of Justice in the Immigration “Courts.” They merely “rubber stamp” the defective final product. It’s called “going along to get along” or “cowardice in the face of tyranny.”

For some reason, not obvious those of who once put our careers on the line to stand up for justice and the legal rights and human dignity of the most vulnerable among us, many, many Article III Judges seem to treat “life tenure” as a sinecure that empowers them to ignore needlessly ruined lines and human suffering, rather than as an opportunity, given to none others within our democratic institutions, to stand up for truth, justice, and the Constitution, even in the face of an overbearing and tyrannical Executive who has no respect for your functions.

Since you seem to have disturbingly little understanding of the true nature of the system which forms a significant part of your appellate workload, let me help you out. Members of the Board of Immigration Appeals are not true “judges” in any sense of the word. They are “employees” of Attorney General Billy Barr.

Billy himself is an acolyte of the “Unitary Executive” — a neo-fascist concept described by former White House Counsel and ex-con John Dean as meaning “that neither Congress nor the federal courts can tell the President what to do or how to do it.” In Billy’s view,. the power of Donald Trump, or any other GOP President (I doubt that he would apply it to a Democrat President), is unlimited and unfettered and the functions of the Judiciary and the Legislature are largely meaningless, except to the extent that they align with Trump’s agenda. The same goes for the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. Code. They are nothing more than what Donald Trump and his toadies like Billy say they are.

Billy Barr is also an unapologetic agent of DHS Enforcement. Although nominally listed as a “party” before these “kangaroo court’ proceedings involving migrants, Barr and his equally contemptuous and lawless predecessor, Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions, have made it clear that “their judges” are to operate as an adjunct of their “partners” at DHS enforcement. Their only meaningful function is to railroad as many migrants as possible out of the country without regard to Due Process or legal rights.

Indeed, both Barr and Sessions have simply rewritten the law, through bogus “precedent decisions” that plainly violate the basic rules of judicial ethics requiring impartiality and forbidding prejudgment of cases, as will as requiring that litigants and their attorneys be treated with basic respect and civility. All of these “bogus precedents” favor DHS Enforcement; none favor the individuals trying to save their lives and vindicate their legal rights. A number reverse well-established rules insuring fair adjudication, particularly for asylum seekers, while others deprive “their judges” of even minimal power to manage their dockets in a rational manner.

Additionally, Sessions and Barr have proved to be historically incompetent managers. While doubling the number of Immigration Judges, by hiring almost exclusively from the ranks of government prosecutors, they have more than doubled the court backlog, now approximately 1.1 million “active” cases with another 300,000 “waiting in the wings” as a result of a mindless and unethical precedent decision by Sessions reversing years of slow but incremental progress on docket management.

They have also created this dysfunctional mess through a process of eliminating the reasonable and sensible use of priorities and “prosecutorial discretion” by DHS in the Immigration Courts as well as by using a process known as “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” or “ADR.” Under ADR, judges and cases are shuffled around the country and the dockets are rearranged to respond to the “emergency of the day” while “ready for trial” cases, some of which have been pending for many years, are arbitrarily “orbited” to the end of dockets, some of which stretch out beyond 2024.

The judges and Board Members work for Billy Barr, who can fire them, reassign them, send them off to the FOIA unit, or turn them into “hall walkers.” (All of which actually happened during the reign of John Ashcroft, where a group of us were “punished” for exerting our authority as independent quasi-judicial officials and the BIA was absurdly cut from 23 Members to 12, under an astoundingly disingenuous claim of “efficiency.” By comparison, Barr recently announced an equally ill-conceived and unjustified plan to expand the BIA to over 50 Members stationed throughout the country).

Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that Board Members feel themselves compelled and justified in ignoring your court orders in favor of a footnote in letter from the Attorney General, “the boss.” It’s completely consistent with the theory of the all-powerful “Unitary Executive” and the actuality that Board Members and Immigration Judges are constantly told that there are “mere employees” of the Attorney General required to carry out his “policies” under the threat of job loss.

The good news is that you folks aren’t as powerless as you seem to think yourselves to be. You don’t actually need a “motion” from private counsel to:

Hold this systemic clown show purporting to be a “court” system unconstitutional, as it most surely is, and shut it down pending legislative reform;
Throw Billy Barr in jail for his contemptuous behavior in allowing the BIA to violate your valid orders and then compounding it by neither confessing error nor apologizing, but rather sending his DOJ attorneys in to waste your valuable time and insult your intelligence;
Schedule some contempt hearings for non-compliant EOIR officials and explain to them that the “Unitary Executive” is nothing more than a figment of Billy’s warped imagination and that, no matter who signs their paychecks, they are obliged to follow the laws, obey your orders, provide Constitutional Due Process of law to individuals coming before them, exercise independent judgment based on the law and facts in the record, and ignore any nonsense stemming from Billy & company that flies in the face of any of the foregoing.

Then and only then, by standing up for the rights of the most vulnerable among us and your constitutional prerogatives, will you become part of the solution instead of “just another snappy quote line in one of my Courtside headlines.”

If you don’t act now, this dysfunctional mess of an out of control, illegal, and grotesquely mismanaged system will eventually fall into your collective judicial laps, no matter how much you would like to shun it. For example, Billy is encouraging, basically demanding, that the BIA make more use of largely judicially discredited. “summary affirmances” and often arbitrary, capricious, and sloppily reasoned, “single member opinions,” both entered without meaningful deliberation or discussion, to “rubber stamp” more removal orders. Indeed, one of your retired colleagues, Judge Richard Posner, was an outspoken critic of the shockingly unprofessional and frequently incorrect results produced by the earlier “weaponization” of “assembly line justice,” featuring “summary affirmances” and “single member decisions” resulting from the “Ashcroft debacle.”

Billy and his EOIR bureaucratic toadies fully intend to further reduce the already questionable quality of the “legal product” that the BIA sends your way. They are counting on you folks to either 1) look the way and join the”rubber stamp brigade,” or 2) do their dirty work for them. At that point, you will not be able to avoid the “judgment of history” regarding your own complicity and fecklessness in the face of lawless tyranny that is destroying our precious democratic institutions and even more precious human lives every day. Wake up and act, before it’s too late, for you and for our nation!

Due Process Forever!

With my very best wishes,

PWS

01-25-19

FOOTNOTE:

For those interested, Judge Easterbrook was appointed by President Reagan; Judge Bauer by President Ford; and Judge Hamilton by President Obama.

If nothing else, Billy and EOIR are uniting judges across the political spectrum in their disgust and outrage.

NY TIMES BLASTED FOR GIVING FORUM TO WHITE NATIONALIST PROPAGANDA FROM CIS SHILL! — “The organization has gained credibility by writing pseudo-science ‘research’ papers that are little more than racist ideology dressed up in scholarly language.”

Sebastian Murdock
Senior Reporter
HuffPost

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-times-anti-immigration-op-ed-hate-group_n_5e21d9d8c5b673621f752f9c

The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank, is categorized as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

BY SEBASTIAN MURDOCK

SENIOR REPORTER

HIUFFPOST

The New York Times published an op-ed decrying immigration by an author claiming to be a “liberal restrictionist” who is in fact attached to a known hate group.

The column, published Friday, was written by , “a senior research fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies,” according to the biography listed under his byline.

CIS, which calls itself “an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization,” is a known hate group that has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-immigrant movement that hires racist writers and associates with white nationalists.

“I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted,” Kammer’s headline reads. The piece begins with an anecdote about how immigrants take the jobs of American-born workers and later claims “many liberal Democrats” want illegal immigration to run rampant:

Now many liberal Democrats, including those who call for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, seek to erase the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. Under the banner of inclusiveness, equality, human rights, racial reconciliation and reparations for American interventions in the third world, those liberals demand sanctuary for those who make it past the Border Patrol or overstay a visa. Few speak openly of open borders, but that is essentially what they are calling for.

Throughout the piece, Kammer seems set on reminding readers that he is liberal, even if his views might suggest otherwise.

“That’s why I call myself a liberal restrictionist,” Kammer, a former journalist, writes. “I have long considered myself a moderate liberal, in part because Democrats have always been the allies of working people.”

White House adviser Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, has cited CIS when speaking about immigration, and in 2011, the group released a report attempting to connect immigration with the creation of future terrorists, calling them “terror babies.”

The organization has gained credibility by writing pseudo-science “research” papers that are little more than racist ideology dressed up in scholarly language. According to the SPLC, “longtime CIS executive director Mark Krikorian’s contributions to the immigration policy debate rarely rise above petulant commentary dashed with extremist statements.”

Running a column by an author employed by a known hate group is the latest in the Times’s run of publishing racist pieces in its opinion section. In December, columnist and known bedbug Bret Stephens cited a study by a white nationalist that falsely claimed Ashkenazi Jews have a higher IQ than other races. The study he cited “traffics in centuries-old anti-Semitic tropes,” according to the SPLC.

Do better, New York Times.

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

Ben Mathis-Lilley
Chief News Blogger
SLATE

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/times-op-ed-white-nationalist-center-for-immigration-studies.html

THE SLATEST

Times Taps White Nationalist Organization for Thought-Provoking Perspective on Immigration

By BEN MATHIS-LILLEY

JAN 17, 20206:42 PM

The New York Times opinion section under editor James Bennet ostensibly aims to challenge the paper’s predominately liberal readers by presenting them with thoughtful critiques of their worldview. In practice, it runs pieces like this recent argument that launching a war against Iran would end attacks against American interests in the Middle East—which was written by a veteran of the Bush administration who had predicted confidently in a 2003 piece also published by the Times that launching a war against Iraq would end attacks against American interests in the Middle East. There was no acknowledgment in the new piece of the old one, as an opinion section committed to intellectual honesty might require, nor was it particularly challenging in the sense of being difficult to rebut. But it did make people on the left feel bad, and like they were losing their minds, which is the bar that Bennet’s section requires an argument to clear.

The essay “I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted,” published in the Times Thursday, may represent the nadir of this approach. It makes a familiar argument: that “the left” believes in a “post-national” system of open borders which sacrifices the interests of native-born working Americans to the interests of low-skilled foreign immigrants who drive down wages and disrupt the cultural cohesiveness of their communities. It argues for respecting a distinction between legal and illegal immigration and asserts that Donald Trump’s position on immigration can be appreciated, in a non-racist way, as “a patriotic battle to defend common people.” It accuses Trump’s critics of having had their minds addled by “tribal passions” and a fetish for conflict “between ethnic groups,” and it proposes a “conciliatory” policy that would offer amnesty to existing undocumented workers but institute a crackdown regime of visa enforcement that would prevent future undocumented individuals from finding jobs.

The familiarity of the article’s arguments is matched by the familiarity of its flaws. While large-scale immigration is, in fact, believed by some non-racists to flatten wages at the bottom of the pay scale, it’s also known to accelerate rather than retard economic expansion overall, and tends to be supported by progressives who advocate for other means of increasing working-class wages and sharing the benefits of GDP growth. The distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration is not some ancient, race-agnostic pillar of global affairs, but rather a concept that was instituted in the United States in the early 20th century to explicitly discriminate against Asian, southern European, and eastern European individuals and expanded in the 1960s to explicitly discriminate against Mexicans. Trump’s support is strongest in areas where there are fewer undocumented immigrants, not more, and he lost four of the five states that have the highest undocumented populations per capita. Many of the most immigration-heavy and ethnically diverse cities in the U.S. are also the safest and wealthiest and are considered so desirable to live in by migrating native-born Americans that they are experiencing housing crises.

As to whether criticizing an administration that instituted the premeditated, systematic separation of young children from their parents after they applied legally for asylum is a matter of unseemly “tribal passions,” or whether support for the principles of inclusive American citizenship described on the Statue of Liberty constitutes “post-national” anti-patriotism, perhaps we can agree to disagree.

More concerning than any of these specific problems, though, is the piece’s provenance: It’s written by someone named Jerry Kammer, a fellow at a think tank called the Center for Immigration Studies. Kammer has made a career out of covering immigration policy, he writes, for two reasons: “I was fascinated by its human, political and moral complexity. I also wanted to push back against the campaign by activist groups to label restrictionism as inherently racist.” He expresses regret that “odious people” with white-power affiliations have given the cause of cutting back on immigration a “bad name.”

What neither Kammer nor the Times discloses is that the Center for Immigration Studies was in fact founded by these people, most prominent among them a white nationalist named John Tanton who died last year. Tanton, as the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented, believed that the United States needed to maintain a “European-American majority, and a clear one at that”; he founded CIS, he wrote in the 1980s, in order to give his ideas the appearance of independent “credibility.”

Kammer does write that he disagrees with “some of the center’s hard-line positions.” Among his more hard-line colleagues at CIS are a writer named Jason Richwine, who contributed to a journal founded by white supremacist Richard Spencer and who has said that “IQ” is the “most important” difference between racial groups. (As the SPLC has documented, CIS has circulated literally hundreds of articles by explicit white supremacists like Spencer via links in its weekly newsletter. Its director once accused Barack Obama of trying to “foment race war.”) A statement of purpose on the CIS website is credited to longtime Tanton collaborator Dan Stein, who once complained that mass immigration was a tool developed by “Ted Kennedy and his political allies” in approximately 1958 to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance.”

In 1997, the Wall Street Journal wrote about Tanton in a piece called “The Intellectual Roots of Nativism.” It was a scathing article which noted that Tanton had once described the immigrant’s contribution to society as “defecating and creating garbage and looking for jobs.” The piece expressed concern that “otherwise sober-minded conservatives” and “reasonable critics of immigration” were affiliating themselves with his ideas. The author of that WSJ article, a 28-year-old journalist named Tucker Carlson, has since made the career-advancing decision to embrace Tanton-style nativism; he was in the news not too long ago for complaining in his role as a Fox News host that immigrants make the United States physically “dirtier.”

Whatever space ever existed between mainstream conservatism and white-power nationalism, Carlson demonstrates, has collapsed. And it turns out that the “odious people” that Kammer references in the Times are actually his colleagues and forebears, who created his organization so that policies intended to perpetuate “European-American” and “Anglo-Saxon” superiority could be laundered into the respectable discourse. What else is there to say but: It worked!

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

So, we have a White Nationalist in the White House assisted by neo-Nazi advisor Stephen Miller actually turning nativism into “Government policy.” Other white supremacists are scattered in key positions throughout the Government, particularly the immigration bureaucracy. Trump tweets and right-wing media put out a constant barrage of nativist lies, misrepresentations, false narratives, and racial, ethnic, and religious slurs.

So, just why is it that the “mainstream media” owes White Nationalists yet another forum to spread their nativist propaganda?

It’s not limited, of course, to just the Times. The WashPost regularly publishes largely fact and value free right-wing blather from professional shills like Marc Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt under the guise of “op-eds.”

And Chuck Todd regularly invites GOP congenital liars and Trump toadies like Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to spread their lies, false narratives, and debunked “conspiracy theories” from the “bully pulpit” of “Meet the Press.” To top it off, Chuck then appears to be flabbergasted that when he confronts these guys with truth and facts, they “double down” continuing to lie to his face, ignore established facts, and spread Putinesque conspiracy theories.

Fact is, most of the Trump agenda is corrupt, counterfactual, unethical, inhumane, divisive, and corrosive to American democracy. We receive enough of it from lots of sources every day, pretty much 24-7-365. Is it really necessary for those supposedly dedicated to truth and democracy to give more free “air time” to nativist shills spreading their racially corrosive, divisive, anti-democracy propaganda?

PWS

01-18-20

PAUL WALDMAN @ WASHPOST: Why True Bipartisan Immigration Reform In Our National Interest Will Require “Regime Change:” “[I]t’s highly unlikely that we’ll achieve such reform, even reform most Republicans could live with, without both houses of Congress and the White House in Democratic hands. But that will happen sooner or later. Then we’ll see if we can get closer to a solution that everyone can live with over the long run.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/31/never-mind-wall-theres-more-important-question-we-need-answer/

Waldman writes:

As immigration policy hangs over the ongoing conflict over whether the government is going to remain open, there’s something missing from this discussion, something so fundamental that it’s quite remarkable that we all seem to have forgotten to even ask about it. The president is demanding his border wall, Democrats are fighting against him, and occasionally we bring up issues like the fate of the Dreamers and those here under Temporary Protected Status.

But what nobody asks is this: What kind of immigration system do we actually want?

Not what might happen in the next negotiation or what each side would be willing to give up, but what does each side see as the ultimate goal they’re working toward? If they could look forward ten or twenty years and say “This is where we should get to,” what would that look like?

It’s a vital question, because whatever we’re doing at the moment should be guided by our long-term goals. Once we understand what those goals are, we can think more clearly about where we should go after we get this whole shutdown ridiculousness behind us. And we all ought to be able to agree that there is some future we’re trying to arrive at, a point at which we have a system that works to our satisfaction and immigration isn’t something we’re constantly at each other’s throats about.

That may not be possible, but I’ll start with what liberals would like to see. There are certainly disagreements not just on the left generally but among immigration advocates as well, but there is a basic vision one can identify.

The first thing they want, of course, is to take the 11 million or so undocumented immigrants who are in the country now and give them a path to citizenship. That’s something even some Republicans agree with, and if you put requirements like learning English and paying back taxes on it, support becomes nearly universal.

Second, liberals would like to see an expansion of the legal immigration system, which is a consistent source of frustration and a driver of illegal immigration. When it can take decades to get approved to move to the United States, of course many people are going to opt for the illegal route, even if it can be dangerous and uncertain. If the legal immigration works, people will go through it and not around it.

And if you have a well-functioning legal system, you can make illegal immigration less attractive, with things like an E-Verify process that makes it harder to find work if you’re undocumented. There may always be some kind of black market for workers, but if you’re simultaneously offering people a legal path — both toward permanent residency and with temporary work visas for people who are looking only to make some money and then return to their home countries — it will be much smaller problem.

So in the liberal vision, we might end up with about the same number of immigrants coming into the country as we have now, it’s just that the overwhelming majority would be coming legally. We’d have security at the border, but we wouldn’t need ICE breaking down doors and tearing parents from their children’s arms. We’d have a robust system to evaluate asylum claims so we wouldn’t have to be throwing people in cages. We certainly wouldn’t pretend that one day there will be no more demand in the labor market for immigrant workers.

There are many Republicans who could be okay with that future, even if it wasn’t exactly what they wanted. But the conservative vision is complicated. For years, we heard Republican politicians say, “I’m for legal immigration. I’m against illegal immigration.” They may not usually have been advocating significant increases in legal immigration, but it’s important to remember that the current venomous hostility toward immigrants was not always the standard Republican position. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were both far friendlier toward immigrants than Donald Trump is.

Conservatives might disagree with this characterization, but as I see it, their ultimate goal is a system in which coming into the country illegally is utterly impossible, but levels of legal immigration don’t change much. In other words, we still have immigration, but the flow slows to a trickle. And the Trump administration is making attempts to drastically reduce legal immigration. With the president’s enthusiastic support, domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller is driving a nationalist agenda that seeks to drastically reduce the inflow of immigrants to the country and even looks for every possible means to deport both legal and undocumented immigrants, even if they’ve been living here for years or decades.

That’s a somewhat extreme position even within the Republican Party, but it does reflect a discomfort with immigration that is common on the right. It’s the cultural problem, the fact that many people just don’t like having contact with people who don’t look like them or don’t speak the same language they do or eat the same foods they do. Trump very skillfully played to that discomfort by essentially telling voters he could wind back the clock to the time when they were young, before all this disconcerting change happened. His targets were the people who say “I don’t recognize my country anymore,” and when he said he would make America great again, “great again” meant “like things were when you were young.”

That’s a demand that can never be satisfied, even if it’s only a portion of the Republican electorate that really dreams of an America where there are almost no new immigrants and most of those who are already here just disappear. Unfortunately, that portion currently not only controls the White House but exercises a veto over any attempt at comprehensive immigration reform, because the rest of the GOP is so terrified of them.

Which is why it’s highly unlikely that we’ll achieve such reform, even reform most Republicans could live with, without both houses of Congress and the White House in Democratic hands. But that will happen sooner or later. Then we’ll see if we can get closer to a solution that everyone can live with over the long run.

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

Right on, Paul! You “nailed” it! Pretty much what I’ve been saying on “Courtside” all along!

However, the unlikelihood of achieving “comprehensive immigration reform” in the “Age of Trump” shouldn’t prevent the parties from working together in a bipartisan manner on “smaller fixes” such as that relating to child marriage suggested by Nolan Rappaport, posted earlier this week. See https://wp.me/p8eeJm-3Hu

Progress is progress, even by “small steps.”

PWS

02-01-19

JRUBE @WASHPOST: “Horrifying indifference to children’s lives”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2018/12/16/horrifying-indifference-childrens-lives/

Rubin writes:

The Post reported this week:

A 7-year-old girl from Guatemala died of dehydration and shock after she was taken into Border Patrol custody last week for crossing from Mexico into the United States illegally with her father and a large group of migrants along a remote span of New Mexico desert, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Thursday. . . .

According to CBP records, the girl and her father were taken into custody about 10 p.m. Dec. 6 south of Lordsburg, N.M., as part of a group of 163 people who approached U.S. agents to turn themselves in.

More than eight hours later, the child began having seizures at 6:25 a.m., CBP records show. Emergency responders, who arrived soon after, measured her body temperature at 105.7 degrees, and according to a statement from CBP, she “reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s statement in response to reports of the child’s death was a moral and legal disgrace:

Traveling north through Mexico illegally in an attempt to reach the United States, is extremely dangerous. Drug cartels, human smugglers and the elements pose deadly risks to anyone who seeks to cross our border illegally. Border Patrol always takes care of individuals in their custody and does everything in their power to keep people safe. Every year the Border Patrol saves hundreds of people who are overcome by the elements between our ports of entry. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts and the best efforts of the medical team treating the child, we were unable to stop this tragedy from occurring.

“Once again, we are begging parents to not put themselves or their children at risk attempting to enter illegally. Please present yourselves at a port of entry and seek to enter legally and safely.”

For starters, the federal government is responsible for the health and welfare of anyone it detains — whether it is a criminal in a prison, a child in its foster-care system or families detained at the border. Regardless of what the children’s parents did or did not do, the United States has an obligation to the children the moment it detains them. Not to give food and water, or to check the health of those it has in custody, is inexcusable. Blaming the parents as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen did (“This is just a very sad example of the dangers of this journey. This family chose to cross illegally”) reflects her legal and moral obtuseness. In our care, the child’s welfare became our responsibility.

“This tragedy represents the worst possible outcome when people, including children, are held in inhumane conditions,” the ACLU’s Border Rights Center said in a statement. “Lack of accountability, and a culture of cruelty within CBP have exacerbated policies that lead to migrant deaths.” The ACLU continued, “In 2017, migrant deaths increased even as the number of border crossings dramatically decreased. When the Trump administration pushes for the militarization of the border, including more border wall construction, they are driving people fleeing violence into the deadliest desert regions.” The statement pointed out that the incident wasn’t reported for a week. “We call for a rigorous investigation into how this tragedy happened and serious reforms to prevent future deaths,” the statement concluded.

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a progressive pro-immigration group, also responded. Sharry pointed out that a “tragic and preventable death of an innocent seven-year old girl should not be seen as a mistake made in an otherwise humane system, but rather a deliberately cruel and dehumanizing system that has produced yet another death.” His statement asserted that CBP’s holding facilities are characterized by “freezing temperatures, no beds, lights left on, no showers, not enough toilets or toilet paper, filthy conditions, horrible smell, inedible food and not enough clean water to drink, and [are] run by insulting and abusive agents.” The system the administration has set up is seemingly designed to inflict the maximum amount of suffering in a failed attempt to deter migrants:

[The] strategy has many components: tell those who want asylum to request it at ports of entry while making it nearly impossible to request asylum at ports of entry; prosecute those who present themselves to Border Patrol agents between ports of entry for “illegal entry;” separate families in numbers large (now halted by a federal judge) and small (under the flimsy pretext of protecting children from “criminal family members”); detain as long as possible those who seek asylum; lock up minors who arrive unaccompanied minors and scare away their U.S.-residing parents and relatives who want to sponsor them by threatening to arrest and detain those who come forward; and gut asylum standards by unilaterally changing the bases for deciding cases, pressuring trained Asylum Officers to reduce their high rates of deeming Central Americans as having a credible fear of return, and bullying Immigration Judges to deny cases when finally adjudicated.

Now if a pregnant migrant asserts her right to seek an abortion, this administration will go to any lengths to protect the life of the unborn child; for the already-born minors (and adults) in its custody, however, the administration cannot be bothered to ensure humane and safe conditions.

Under the Republican-majority House and Senate, rigorous oversight of the Department of Homeland Security and legislation to try to ameliorate these conditions were all but impossible. With a Democratic-majority House, this will no longer be the case. The House Judiciary Committee will be headed by Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) in the new Congress. He left no doubt as to his intention to get to the bottom of the tragedy and the conditions that allowed this to occur:

On Friday, Nadler and Democrats who will head House Judiciary subcommittees sent a letter to the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security requesting the IG “initiate an investigation into this incident, as well as CBP policies or practices that may have contributed to the child’s death [and] CBP’s failure to timely notify Congress of this incident.” The letter told the IG, “It is hard to overstate our frustration with the fact that we learned of this incident through media reports one week after the incident occurred. It is clear that CBP failed to follow the reporting requirements laid out in last year’s omnibus appropriations bill until after the news of this death was already public.”

With adequate border security and staffing, a sufficient number of immigration judges deployed to handle the caseload, reversal of the administration’s deliberately cruel policies, and effective diplomacy with and provision of assistance to the countries from which these people are fleeing for their lives, the current, intolerable situation should improve.

It’s a cruel irony that Trump has portrayed refugees as a threat to Americans. In fact, the reverse is true.

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

Rubin is right. Part of this Administration’s cruel scheme here is to deflect attention from the real threat to our national security and Constitution presented by Trump and his corrupt, scofflaw gang. And, in the long disgraceful tradition of cowards, bullies, and authoritarians, he does so by attacking the most vulnerable and least able to defend themselves, playing on racism and nationalist jingoism.

That’s why the New Due Process Army is such an important force for protecting the human and legal rights of migrants, and by so doing, protecting the rights of all Americans against Executive abuse!

PWS

12-17=18

NO LONGER SUBTLE: Racism, Hate, Intolerance, Lies, Fear-Mongering Against Immigrants At Core Of Trump GOP’s Midterm Pitch! -– The Ugliest Side Of American History & Politics Rears Its Head!

https://apple.news/AxHra5TtoTEqR96pQ3ermwA

RUCKER AND FELICIA SONMEZ report for the Washington Post:

COLUMBIA, Mo. — President Trump, joined by many Republican candidates, is dramatically escalating his efforts to take advantage of racial divisions and cultural fears in the final days of the midterm campaign, part of an overt attempt to rally white supporters to the polls and preserve the GOP’s congressional majorities.

On Thursday, Trump ratcheted up the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been the centerpiece of his midterm push by portraying a slow-moving migrant caravan, consisting mostly of families traveling on foot through Mexico, as a dangerous “invasion” and suggesting that if any migrants throw rocks they could be shot by the troops that he has deployed at the border. The president also vowed to take action next week to construct “massive tent cities” aimed at holding migrants indefinitely and making it more difficult for them to remain in the country.

“If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal aliens and giant caravans, you better vote Republican,” Trump said at a rally here Thursday evening.

The remarks capped weeks of incendiary rhetoric from Trump, and they come just five days after a gunman reportedly steeped in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories about the migrant caravan slaughtered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in what is believed to be the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.

Trump has repeatedly cast the migrants as “bad thugs” and criminals while asserting without evidence that the caravan contains “unknown Middle Easterners” — apparently meant to suggest there are terrorists mixed in with the families fleeing violence in Honduras and other Central American nations and seeking asylum in the United States. The president also said Wednesday that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if liberal donor George Soros had funded the migrant groups — echoing the conspiracy theory that is thought to have influenced the accused Pittsburgh shooter.

Trump questioned again at Thursday night’s rally whether it was really “just by accident” that the caravans were forming.

“Somebody was involved, not on our side of the ledger,” Trump told the crowd. “Somebody was involved, and then somebody else told him, ‘You made a big mistake.’ ”

He also called birthright citizenship a “crazy, lunatic policy,” warning that it could allow people such as “a dictator who we hate and who’s against us” to have a baby on American soil, and “congratulations, your son or daughter is now an American citizen.”

Many of Trump’s Republican acolytes, from Connecticut to California, have followed his lead in the use of inflammatory messages, including an ad branding a minority Democratic candidate as a national security threat and a mailer visually depicting a Jewish Democrat as a crazed person with a wad of money in his hand.

Trump and his supporters argue that the media and the president’s political opponents call racism or anti-Semitism where none exists as a way to demean him and divide Americans. At a campaign rally Wednesday night in Estero, Fla., Trump sought to link his supporters to the accusations.

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“We have forcefully condemned hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice in all of its ugly forms, but the media doesn’t want you to hear your story,” Trump said. “It’s not my story. It’s your story. And that’s why 33 percent of the people in this country believe the fake news is, in fact — and I hate to say this — in fact, the enemy of the people.”

Meanwhile, an online campaign video personally promoted by Trump this week was denounced by Democrats and some Republicans on Thursday as toxic or even racist.

The footage focuses on Luis Bracamontes, a twice-deported Mexican immigrant who was given a death sentence in April for killing two California law enforcement officers in 2014. The recording portrays him as the face of the current migrant caravan, when in fact he has been in prison for four years.

The 53-second video is filled with audible expletives and shows Bracamontes smiling as he declares, “I killed f—— cops.” With a shaved head, a mustache and long chin hair, Bracamontes shows no remorse for his crimes and vows, “I’m going to kill more cops soon.”

Trump shared the video Wednesday afternoon with his 55.5 million followers on Twitter, and it remained pinned atop his Twitter page the next day. As of late Thursday afternoon, the video had been viewed 3.5 million times.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), a potential 2020 challenger to the president, said Trump crossed a new Rubicon by posting the video.

“We all go through periods where we’re in a tough race and we’ve got to figure out what we should do, but at some point there’s just an ethical line that you should not cross, and I think it’s been crossed here,” Kasich said in an interview. “This latest ad is an all-time low. It’s a terrible ad, it’s designed to frighten people and it’s wrong.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) sounded a similar note, saying in a statement Thursday that Trump and Republicans “are so desperate to distract voters from their failures on everything from health care to foreign policy, they have sunk to new lows with hateful rhetoric and racist campaign ads.”

Five days from Election Day, the video underscored the dilemma facing Democrats as they work to calibrate their response to the president’s increasingly incendiary language on race and immigration.

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said leaders of her party have two schools of thought about Trump’s video and his caravan rhetoric in general. She said they fear that reacting to it only allows the president to dictate the terms of the debate and “spread the toxins into the bloodstream of the electorate,” but that the tone is so appalling — especially coming from the president himself — that they feel compelled to speak out.

“Trump has opened up a whole new playbook to sow discord and to weaponize hate,” Brazile said. “Everyone has seen low politics. We’ve all done low politics. But Lee Atwater would be shocked at the vitriol we’re seeing today — and, man, Lee was scrappy. This is virulent. It’s bone-chilling. It’s like a toxin.”

Atwater, who died in 1991, was a Republican consultant who was known for crafting culturally divisive messages.

Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) described the video as a “horribly racist” attempt by Trump to “prey on people’s fears and lack of information about how the immigration system works.”

Some conservatives, meanwhile, cheered the president for ramping up his focus on an issue that helped push him to victory in 2016. “The clip of convicted cop murderer Luis Bracamontes laughing in a Calif. court is something every American should see,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote in a tweet.

Republican strategists say Trump’s immigration push is helping the party here in Missouri, where state Attorney General Josh Hawley is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. Race has been a sensitive issue in the state, which was rocked by unrest in 2014 after an unarmed 18-year-old African American man was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.

Ahead of his rally here Thursday in Columbia, the speakers blared “We Are The World,” Michael Jackson’s ode to peace and inclusiveness. Several white supporters interviewed at the event rejected the notion that the president is racially divisive — and they said they resented the very suggestion.

“He’s not a racist president and I’m not a racist,” said Meredith Leon, 65, a retired small-business owner from Columbia. “We want law and order and justice for all people. I’m fed up with everything being race, race, race. Fed up!”

David Ewing, 59, a farmer in Tebbetts, Mo., said he supports Trump’s immigration agenda “100 percent.”

“I don’t think he’s racist,” Ewing said. “It’s just the far left trying to do anything they can to stop him. I ignore them, really.”

As Trump has intensified his rhetoric, a growing number of Republican candidates across the country have followed suit. Some feature graphic anti-immigrant messages and images in their campaign ads, while others have been accused of inciting anti- Semitic or anti-Muslim sentiment.

In Tennessee, a recent ad for Republican Senate nominee Marsha Blackburn features footage of the caravan and warns that it includes “gang members, known criminals, people from the Middle East, possibly even terrorists.” The ad also slams Blackburn’s Democratic opponent, Phil Bredesen, for stating that the caravan is “not a threat to our security.”

An ad released Thursday by Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Scott Wagner features ominous music along with footage of the caravan. “A dangerous caravan of illegals careens to the border, two more behind it, and liberal Tom Wolf is laying out the welcome mat,” the ad declares, referring to the state’s Democratic governor.

A Facebook ad being run by the campaign of Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) features a photo of three heavily tattooed Latino men with the message, “I will protect Georgia from violent criminal gangs.”

And in California, the campaign of Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), who has been indicted on charges of alleged misuse of campaign funds, has called his opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a “national security threat” with “close family connections” to Islamist militant groups. The 29-year-old Democrat’s grandfather, who died 16 years before he was born, was a key planner of the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Campa-Najjar has condemned the attack.

“Instead of making an affirmative case for his own record, he’s trying to disparage the character of a fellow American,” Campa- Najjar said in an interview. “I think that speaks volumes about his policy record.”

The messaging has filtered down to local races as well. In Connecticut, a mailer recently sent out by Republican state Senate nominee Ed Charamut’s campaign depicts Democrat Matthew Lesser as holding a wad of money with a crazed look in his eyes. Lesser is Jewish, and the ad has been denounced for promoting anti-Semitic stereotypes.

After first defending the ad, Charamut’s campaign later issued an apology to Lesser, acknowledging that “the imagery could be interpreted as anti-Semitic.”

Some candidates who have long made inflammatory remarks on immigration and race have found themselves facing a backlash in recent days. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who met in August with representatives of a far-right Austrian party and declared that “Western civilization is on the decline,” was publicly rebuked Tuesday by Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee. King, who previously retweeted a self-described “Nazi sympathizer” and endorsed a Toronto mayoral candidate who appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast, has also seen companies such as Land O’Lakes withdraw their support for his campaign.

Trump’s rhetoric also has prompted outrage from a handful of lawmakers from his party, particularly those who are departing Congress or are in Democratic-leaning districts. Republican leadership has largely remained silent.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a frequent critic of Trump who is retiring at the end of his current term, said in a tweet Thursday that the ad featuring Bracamontes was “sickening” and that “Republicans everywhere should denounce it.”

Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), whose district was won by Hillary Clinton by 16 points in 2016, said on CNN that while he hadn’t seen the ad, it was “definitely part of a divide-and-conquer strategy that a lot of politicians, including the president, have used successfully in the past.”

“I hope this doesn’t work,” Curbelo said. “I hope that type of strategy starts failing in our country, but that’s up to the American people.”

Sonmez reported from Washington. Sean Sullivan, Matt Viser and Eli Rosenberg in Washington contributed to this report.

Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Rucker also is a Political Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.

Felicia Sonmez is a national political reporter covering breaking news from the White House, Congress and the campaign trail. She was previously based in Beijing, where she worked for Agence France-Presse and The Wall Street Journal.

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I always find it interesting when individuals who support, promote, and enable racist agendas “bristle” when confronted with the truth about their actions. Jeff Sessions is one great example of that phenomenon. But, it is what it is. Trump and his brand of GOP are running on an overtly racist platform; support for Trump simply can’t be detached from the reality of what he promotes and stands for — hate, dishonesty, intolerance, and frankly, a very grim future for a country that can’t get its act together and celebrate and use the skills, creativity, dedication, and humanity of all of its inhabitants. Whether you are conservative or liberal, the Trump platform of racism and hate can’t possibly be the keys to success as a nation. We need responsible moral leadership in American. It certainly can’t come from Trump or the GOP at this time in our history.

Get out the vote! Start the long, methodical, democratic process for regime change and restoration of true American values! Before it’s too late for all of us!

PWS

11-02-18

As reported on ImmigrationProf Blog:

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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