Turkey – immigrationcourtside.com

⚖️🧑🏻‍⚖️🍅FOOD FIGHT ERUPTS IN 5TH CIRCUIT AS EN BANC MAJORITY DECIDES TO FOLLOW LAW EVEN WHERE IMMIGRANT WINS! — 3 Trump Appointees, 1 Bush II Appointee, Join All Dem Appointees To Thwart 8 GOP Scofflaws’ Efforts To Overturn Rodriguez v. Garland!😎

The issue is whether an in absentia removal order can be based on a statutorily defective notice. The panel followed the Supreme’s decision in Niz-Chavez and rejected the BIA’s conflicting decision in Matter of Laparra. In other words, the panel required the Government to follow the statute, a process known as “complying with the law.” This sent some of this most conservative circuit’s most far-right judges over the edge. Here’s the en banc decision:

https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/20/20-60008-CV1.pdf

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Credit Dan Kowalski over at LexisNexis for the “food fight” characterization.
The scofflaw GOP dissenters cited “deference” to the Executive, something they have pointedly refused to apply to Biden Administration precedents and policies favoring migrants.
The majority says: “[The BIA] flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s Pereira decision, which Laparra ignored.”
Incredibly, Garland is on the “wrong side” of this controversy, defending the legally incorrect misinterpretation of his “Trump holdover” BIA!
The statutory requirement at issue: That a “Notice to Appear” before the Immigration Court inform the individual of the time and place of the hearing. How difficult does that sound? Not very, unless you are bumbling bureaucrat at DHS and EOIR who chose, even after the Supremes’ initial decision, to violate that decision and the statute in almost 100% of the cases instituted before the Immigration Courts!
Kudos to the 3 Trump appointees and one Bush II appointee who joined 3 Obama appointees and 2 Clinton appointees to uphold the rule of law and thwart their GOP scofflaw colleagues.
Interestingly, and perhaps mildly encouraging, the “Trump appointees” split 3-3 on this one.
Apparently nothing drives a wedge between conservative judges like the scary prospect of following the law when it gives immigrants a win!
Future ambitious academic study: How much of the current out of control backlog can be traced to the Government’s, and particularly the BIA’s, inept handling of straightforward notice requirements set forth in the statute?
There’s a reason why I keep referring to Garland’s out of control EOIR backlogs as “largely self-created,” albeit in fairness not exclusively by him. The Trump Administration, and to a lesser extent the Obama Administration, also “excelled” at “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” driven by “prioritizing” improper political goals over due process, fundamental fairness, quality, and practical scholarship in the Immigration Courts.

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

PWS

04-21-22

GRETA THUNBERG: AN INSPIRATIONAL LEADER FOR OUR TIMES & THE FUTURE: “She is committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to try to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns.”

Carolyn Kormann writes in The New Yorker:

News Desk

The Pure Spirit of Greta Thunberg is the Perfect Antidote to Donald Trump

She is committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to try to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns.

On December 3rd, Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old climate activist from Sweden, completed her second transatlantic voyage, by almost entirely emissions-free sailboats, in the span of four months. Her small figure, dressed in black, stood, waving, on the bow of a catamaran, as it approached the port of Lisbon. Hundreds of people, standing onshore, cheered, welcoming her back to Europe. “I’m not travelling like this because I want everyone to do so,” she told reporters after walking off the boat onto dry land. “I’m doing this to send a message that it is impossible to live sustainably today, and that needs to change.” The scene felt both ancient and precisely of this moment, like Thunberg herself, who writes regularly in a paper journal but has mastered social-media virality, who can seem ageless and androgynous (the fierce stare) while also strikingly young and girlish (the braids), who acts with an otherworldly grace while delivering an outraged message grounded in the latest, best climate science. Her lightning-strike emergence as the planet’s hero, her capacity to inspire students around the world—all in the span of little more than a year—can seem like a prophesied story, an epic poem, a fable. Margaret Atwood (and others, including myself) have compared her to Joan of Arc—if the teen-age medieval warrior, who was burned at the stake in part for impersonating a man, had been inspired by scientific reports instead of divine voices and visions of angels. Centuries from now, we hope, people will live in a thriving, equitable civilization and tell Thunberg’s tale, too.

But it is, as Thunberg says repeatedly, precisely what we do during this century that will determine the fate of those future centuries, and what we do during the next decade that will determine the climate for the nearly two billion children alive today. They are the ones Thunberg represents, whom she is fighting for, and whom she has mobilized, since August, 2018, when she first sat outside the Swedish Parliament with a simple handwritten sign that read, in black letters, “SKOLSTREJK FOR KLIMATET.” Hundreds of thousands of students (and, gradually, their parents), in cities around the world, have followed her lead, striking from school and marching in the streets to protest for climate action. “You say you love your children above all else,” she said in her first big address, at last December’s United Nations climate talks. “And yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.”

From Lisbon, Thunberg took a train to Madrid, where leaders from around the world were gathering for another round—the twenty-fifth since 1995—of U.N. climate negotiations (known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP25). The point of this year’s talks was for countries to lay the groundwork for ambitious new targets in the reduction of their greenhouse-gas emissions. By the end of 2020, according to the terms of the Paris Agreement, countries are to commit to new nationally determined contributions (N.D.C.s, in U.N.-speak) that reflect the scale of global decarbonization necessary to limit global heating to two degrees Celsius. (The current pool of N.D.C.s, which many countries are not even meeting, would lead to more than three degrees warming by century’s end.) A related issue at the talks has involved carbon markets—detailed in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement—in which one country can pay another country for its emissions reductions (the equivalent of buying a carbon credit) and then count those reductions towards its own N.D.C. Australia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and India have, reportedly, all been blocking text that would provide strong regulations of these kinds of markets and accounting mechanisms. Though the final text of this year’s agreement is due today, the deliberations will likely continue at least until Saturday.

Thunberg, meanwhile, has increasingly referred, in mathematical detail, to carbon budgets, or the amount of carbon dioxide that we have left to emit into the atmosphere if we want to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In her speech to world leaders in Madrid, on Tuesday, she referred her audiences to page 108, chapter 2, of the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, and she said that, if we are to have a sixty-seven per cent chance of achieving that goal, we had, as of the first of January, 2018, four-hundred-and-twenty gigatons of carbon dioxide left in our carbon budget. That number is now much lower, considering that we emit approximately forty-two gigatons of carbon dioxide every year. This means that we have roughly eight years left to burn fossil fuels at current levels before our budget is empty. For all the efforts underway to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, they are nowhere near enough. Global emissions again hit a record high in 2019. As Thunberg also said, in the same speech, “The biggest danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and C.E.O.s are making it look like real action is happening, when in fact almost nothing is being done, apart from clever accounting and creative P.R.”

On Wednesday, Time named Thunberg the magazine’s Person of the Year. Donald Trump, who is famously obsessed with being on the cover of Time, could not stand it. He has campaigned on fossil-fuel expansion, has betrayed on numerous occasions that he does not understand what climate change is, and, on November 4th, he officially began proceedings to remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement. (Every other country in the world remains a signatory to the pact.) On Thursday, in response to Thunberg’s news, he tweeted: “So ridiculous. Greta must work on her Anger Management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!” Thunberg, as always, took the President’s mockery in stride, changing her Twitter bio, minutes later, to “A teenager working on her anger management problem. Currently chilling and watching a good old fashioned movie with a friend.”

This is not the first time that Thunberg has one-upped Trump’s mocking tweets. In September, she gave a historic speech with the kind of rhetorical vigor that exemplifies her gifts as an orator. “This is all wrong,” she said. “I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school, on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!” Later, Trump retweeted a video clip of her remarks, adding, “She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!” The same day, Thunberg put the exact words in her Twitter bio: “A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future.”

Thunberg is Trump’s perfect foil. She is pure spirit, committed to the foremost emergency of our time, to the science behind it, and to the people who are working every day to rapidly change our energy systems and consumption patterns so that we avert climate change’s deadliest impacts and destabilizing tipping points. Thunberg is devoted to learning, writing, and understanding the world around her. She constantly lifts up other young climate leaders—especially those from indigenous and frontline communities—and begs reporters to focus on them, not her. (On Monday, she and Germany’s most prominent youth activist, Luisa Neubauer, hosted a press conference with young leaders from the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Russia, and Uganda.) She is a gifted public speaker, not because she stirs up chaos and hate through incoherent rants, but because she speaks elegantly and intelligently, in logical, pithy, unmuddied sentences. Her rhetorical gifts are, perhaps, all the more remarkable considering that, when she was younger, she fell into a major depression concerning climate change and stopped speaking altogether for months. As she said at the start of her speech on Tuesday, “A year and a half ago, I didn’t speak to anyone unless I really had to. But then I found a reason to speak.”

Carolyn Kormann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Read more.

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Wow! No wonder Trump and his cronies are so scared of her!

PWS

12-14-19

ERIC HOLDER, JR. @ WASHPOST: Former AG Blasts Chief Toady Billy Barr As Unfit For Office!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eric-holder-william-barr-is-unfit-to-be-attorney-general/2019/12/11/99882092-1c55-11ea-87f7-f2e91143c60d_story.html

Opinions

Eric Holder: William Barr is unfit to be attorney general

12-12-19

Attorney General William P. Barr in Washington on Tuesday. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

By Eric H. Holder Jr.

Dec. 11, 2019 at 9:13 p.m. EST

Eric H. Holder Jr., a Democrat, was U.S. attorney general from 2009 to 2015.

As a former U.S. attorney general, I am reluctant to publicly criticize my successors. I respect the office and understand just how tough the job can be.

But recently, Attorney General William P. Barr has made a series of public statements and taken actions that are so plainly ideological, so nakedly partisan and so deeply inappropriate for America’s chief law enforcement official that they demand a response from someone who held the same office.

Last month, at a Federalist Society event, the attorney general delivered an ode to essentially unbridled executive power, dismissing the authority of the legislative and judicial branches — and the checks and balances at the heart of America’s constitutional order. As others have pointed out, Barr’s argument rests on a flawed view of U.S. history. To me, his attempts to vilify the president’s critics sounded more like the tactics of an unscrupulous criminal defense lawyer than a U.S. attorney general.

When, in the same speech, Barr accused “the other side” of “the systematic shredding of norms and the undermining of the rule of law,” he exposed himself as a partisan actor, not an impartial law enforcement official. Even more troubling — and telling — was a later (and little-noticed) section of his remarks, in which Barr made the outlandish suggestion that Congress cannot entrust anyone but the president himself to execute the law.

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In Barr’s view, sharing executive power with anyone “beyond the control of the president” (emphasis mine), presumably including a semi-independent Cabinet member, “contravenes the Framers’ clear intent to vest that power in a single person.” This is a stunning declaration not merely of ideology but of loyalty: to the president and his interests. It is also revealing of Barr’s own intent: to serve not at a careful remove from politics, as his office demands, but as an instrument of politics — under the direct “control” of President Trump.

Not long after Barr made that speech, he issued what seemed to be a bizarre threat to anyone who expresses insufficient respect for law enforcement, suggesting that “if communities don’t give that support and respect, they might find themselves without the police protection they need.” No one who understands — let alone truly respects — the impartial administration of justice or the role of law enforcement could ever say such a thing. It is antithetical to the most basic tenets of equality and justice, and it undermines the need for understanding between law enforcement and certain communities and flies in the face of everything the Justice Department stands for.

It’s also particularly ironic in light of the attorney general’s comments this week, in which he attacked the FBI and the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General — two vital components of his own department. Having spent the majority of my career in public service, I found it extraordinary to watch the nation’s chief law enforcement official claim — without offering any evidence — that the FBI acted in “bad faith” when it opened an inquiry into then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. As a former line prosecutor, U.S. attorney and judge, I found it alarming to hear Barr comment on an ongoing investigation, led by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, into the origins of the Russia probe. And as someone who spent six years in the office Barr now occupies, it was infuriating to watch him publicly undermine an independent inspector general report — based on an exhaustive review of the FBI’s conduct — using partisan talking points bearing no resemblance to the facts his own department has uncovered.

When appropriate and justified, it is the attorney general’s duty to support Justice Department components, ensure their integrity and insulate them from political pressures. His or her ultimate loyalty is not to the president personally, nor even to the executive branch, but to the people — and the Constitution — of the United States.

Career public servants at every level of the Justice Department understand this — as do leaders such as FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Their fidelity to the law and their conduct under pressure are a credit to them and the institutions they serve.

Others, like Durham, are being tested by this moment. I’ve been proud to know John for at least a decade, but I was troubled by his unusual statement disputing the inspector general’s findings. Good reputations are hard-won in the legal profession, but they are fragile; anyone in Durham’s shoes would do well to remember that, in dealing with this administration, many reputations have been irrevocably lost.

This is certainly true of Barr, who was until recently a widely respected lawyer. I and many other Justice veterans were hopeful that he would serve as a responsible steward of the department and a protector of the rule of law.

Virtually since the moment he took office, though, Barr’s words and actions have been fundamentally inconsistent with his duty to the Constitution. Which is why I now fear that his conduct — running political interference for an increasingly lawless president — will wreak lasting damage.

The American people deserve an attorney general who serves their interests, leads the Justice Department with integrity and can be entrusted to pursue the facts and the law, even — and especially — when they are politically inconvenient and inconsistent with the personal interests of the president who appointed him. William Barr has proved he is incapable of serving as such an attorney general. He is unfit to lead the Justice Department.

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Predictably, there were were a few right wing apologias for Billy. That included a remarkable fictional piece by reliable rightest toady and stout defender of autocracy Hugh Hewitt, also in the Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/11/barrs-focus-abuses-by-fbi-is-entirely-warranted/

Since there is neither legal nor intellectual defense for the vicious attack on our institutions by Trump & Barr, in a misguided effort to “present both sides” of an “argument” where the facts all point one way, the Post has been reduced to giving space to disingenuous right wing hacks like Hewitt.

One the flip side, keeping track of all of the cogent criticisms of Toady Billy’s attacks on America and his own Department would be a full time job. One of the best of this huge field was by a group of former GOP DOJ leadership “alums” who ripped into Barr’s total lack of integrity. https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2019/12/10/former-justice-dept-leaders-slam-barrs-commentary-on-inspector-generals-report/

Here’s an excerpt from that article:

Jonathan Rose, who served under the Reagan administration as the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, said the inspector general’s report “rebuts in detail the AG’s charge that the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign was unjustified, overly intrusive, or systematically suppressed exculpatory evidence.”

“This is the first attorney general in the history of presidential impeachment proceedings to enlist as a partisan warrior on behalf of a President. It is a sad day for those of us who revere the historic commitment of the FBI and the Department of Justice to even-handed law enforcement based on truth and verifiable facts,” said Rose, who had previously served under the Nixon administration as the deputy associate attorney general.

Donald Ayer, who served as deputy attorney general under the George H.W. Bush administration, said Barr’s reaction to the inspector general’s report was reminiscent of his handling of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia investigation. Ahead of the Mueller report’s release, Barr came under criticism for mischaracterizing the report’s findings.

Ayer, a former Jones Day partner who now teaches at Georgetown Law, said the inspector general’s exhaustive investigation showed that the Russia investigation was “properly initiated based on a sound factual basis, and that the allegations of ‘witch hunt’ and bias on the part of those overseeing it are without foundation.”

“Rather than focus on those critical findings which should reassure all Americans, Barr dwells entirely on the report’s further findings that some agents (who he describes as a ‘small group of now-former’ FBI employees) were guilty of misconduct in the manner in which they put forward evidence in some submissions to the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court,” Ayer said, referring to the secretive court tasked with weighing warrant applications filed under the surveillance law.

I personally knew and worked with both Jon Rose and Don Ayer. We were all partners at Jones Day’s D.C. Office in the 1990’s.

We also all served in Senior Executive positions in the DOJ during the Reagan Administration. I knew Don better than Jon. I believe he adjudicated a grievance case that I was handling for the “Legacy INS” during my tenure as Deputy General Counsel. My recollection is that case was one of those stemming from the massive “Attorney Reorganization” that Mike Inman and I implemented to unite all INS Attorneys under the General Counsel’s supervision as part of the “Litigation and Legal Advice Offices,” the actual forerunners of today’s Offices of Chief Counsel at DHS!

Another of those cases actually reached a U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh where I was the Government’s “star witness.” I was found “credible” by the District Judge in his ruling in favor of INS Management.

However, admittedly, about 20 minutes into my answer to the Assistant U.S. Attorney’s first question, the Judge interrupted and said something like: “Counsel, could you instruct your witness to stop the history lesson and just answer the question asked?” Ah, the hazards of witnesses who “know too much.”

Of course, I also served at the DOJ under Eric Holder twice: once when he was the Deputy Attorney General during the Clinton Administration and again during his tenure as Attorney General under Obama.

PWS

12-12-19

MICHAEL GERSON @ WASHPOST: THE “TRULY TRUMPIAN MEN” SYMBOLIZE THE GOP’S DESCENT INTO WHITE NATIONALISM AND DISHONESTY: “Miller and Jordan are giving us a taste of the Truly Trumpian Man — guided by bigotry, seized by conspiracy theories, dismissive of facts and truth, indifferent to ethics, contemptuous of institutional norms and ruthlessly dedicated to the success of a demagogue.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/stephen-miller-and-jim-jordan-give-us-a-taste-of-the-truly-trumpian-man/2019/11/14/e187e8b8-0725-11ea-b17d-8b867891d39d_story.html

Across the years of a presidential administration, the churn of politics and policy brings certain men and women to the top of U.S. politics. The past few days have demonstrated the paths to preferment and influence in the Trump years.

First is the case of Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to President Trump and the administration’s unofficial liaison to the alt-right world.

Miller is best known as the prime mover behind the Muslim travel ban and the main opponent of any political compromise involving compassion for Dream Act “dreamers.” Now, with the release of a trove of emails sent to Breitbart writers and editors in 2015 and 2016 (soon before Miller became a Trump administration official), we get a glimpse of Miller’s inspirations and motivations. In response to the massacre of nine black churchgoers by a white nationalist in 2015, Miller was offended that Amazon removed merchandise featuring the Confederate flag and was concerned about the vandalization of Confederate monuments. Miller encouraged attention at Breitbart to a “white genocide”-themed novel, featuring sexualized violence by refugees. He focused on crime and terrorism by nonwhites as the basis for draconian immigration restrictions. He complained about the “ridiculous statue of liberty myth” and mocked the “national religion” of “diversity.” He recommended and forwarded stories from a range of alt-right sources.

All this is evidence of a man marinated in prejudice. In most presidential administrations, a person with such opinions would be shown the White House exit. But most of Miller’s views — tenderness for the Confederacy, the exaggerated fear of interracial crime, the targeting of refugees for calumny and contempt — have been embraced publicly by the president. Trump could not fire his alt-right alter ego without indicting himself. Miller is safe in the shelter of his boss’s bigotry.

Second, there is Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the tireless, tendentious, often bellowing chief defender of Trump during the impeachment hearings.

Jordan is not, of course, alone in his heroic sycophancy. GOP Reps. Devin Nunes (Calif.), Mark Meadows (N.C.) and others try to equal him. Together they update Alexander Pope: Fools rush in where Mick Mulvaney and Rudy Giuliani fear to tread.

But Jordan has mastered the art of talking utter rubbish in tones of utter conviction. His version of the events at the heart of the impeachment inquiry? Rather than committing corruption, Trump was fighting corruption. Military assistance was suspended, in Jordan’s telling, while the president was deciding whether Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “legit” in his determination to oppose corruption. When Trump found that Zelensky was the “real deal,” the aid was released.

This is a bold but flimsy lie, of the type Trump has made common. Why, in this scenario, would Trump try to secure specific commitments from Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden and his son Hunter, and to examine Trump’s conspiracy theory about Ukrainian influence in the 2016 election? Are we supposed to believe that Trump employed these as random, theoretical examples of corruption that a worthy, crime-fighting leader would root out? And was the release of U.S. aid just two days after Congress was notified about the whistleblower report a coincidence as well?

Jordan asks us not to accept additional facts but to live in a substitute reality. Almost everyone who participated in these events — both professional staff and political appointees — has affirmed that Trump was employing leverage to secure his political objectives. It is the plain meaning of the reconstructed transcript of Trump’s call to Zelensky.

But none of this matters to Jordan or his colleagues. Consistency and coherence are beside the point. Their objective is not to convince the country; it is to maintain and motivate the base, and thus avoid Trump’s conviction in the Senate. The purpose is not to offer and answer arguments but to give partisans an alternative narrative. And the measure of Jordan’s success is not even the political health of his party (which is suffering from its association with Trump); it is the demonstrated fidelity to a single man.

The elevation of Trump to the presidency has given prominence to a certain kind of follower and permission for a certain set of social values. Bolsheviks once talked of creating the New Socialist Man. Miller and Jordan are giving us a taste of the Truly Trumpian Man — guided by bigotry, seized by conspiracy theories, dismissive of facts and truth, indifferent to ethics, contemptuous of institutional norms and ruthlessly dedicated to the success of a demagogue.

Every day of Trump’s term continues the moral deconstruction of the Republican Party and brings the further debasement of American politics.

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Let’s hear that again:

Every day of Trump’s term continues the moral deconstruction of the Republican Party and brings the further debasement of American politics.

Yup!

This also confirms what we already knew about Miller’s “role model,” his former boss and White Nationalist nativist “mentor’ Jeff “Gonzo Apocalypto” Sessions. He’s someone who should have been disowned by the GOP ages ago and who has demonstrated “beyond a reasonable doubt” his total unfitness too hold public office!

PWS

11-15-19

NIKKI HALEY: How Ambitious Daughter Of Immigrants Became A Shill For White Nationalist, Xenophobic, Misogynistic Regime & Its Corrupt Leader — “All she had to do was to ignore her conscience, betray her colleagues and injure her country. A small price to pay for such a brilliant political future.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-officials-believe-trump-is-a-danger-to-the-country-they-have-a-duty-to-say-so/2019/11/11/0541dc64-04bf-11ea-ac12-3325d49eacaa_story.html

Michael Gerson writes in the WashPost:

Nikki Haley used to be known as the other member of President Trump’s Cabinet who left with an intact reputation (in addition to former defense secretary Jim Mattis). In an administration more influenced by Recep Tayyip Erdogan than Ronald Reagan, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations often provided a more traditional rhetorical take on American foreign policy. Haley seemed genuinely to care about human rights and democracy, and to somehow get away with displaying such caring in public. Her confidence in national principles marked her as such a freakish exception that some speculated she might be the rogue, anti-Trump Trump official who wrote an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times.

But Trump’s corruption still pulls at a distance. Clearly convinced that Trumpism is here to stay, Haley has publicly turned against other officials in the administration who saw the president as a dangerous fool. She recounts an hour-long meeting with then-Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who “confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren’t being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country.” The conspirators (in Haley’s telling) considered it a life-and-death matter. “This was how high the stakes were, he and Kelly told me. We are doing the best we can do to save the country, they said. We need you to work with us and help us do it.”

Haley, by her own account, refused to help. “Instead of saying that to me, they should’ve been saying that to the president, not asking me to join them on their sidebar plan,” she now explains. “It should’ve been, ‘Go tell the president what your differences are, and quit if you don’t like what he’s doing.’ But to undermine a president is really a very dangerous thing.”

Here Haley is confusing two categories. If a Cabinet member has a policy objection of sufficient seriousness, he or she should take that concern to the president. If the president then chooses against their position — and if implementing the decision would amount to a violation of conscience — an official should resign. Staying in office to undermine, say, a law or war you disapprove of would be a disturbing arrogation of presidential authority.

But there is an equally important moral priority to consider: If you are a national security official working for a malignant, infantile, impulsive, authoritarian wannabe, you need to stay in your job as long as you can to mitigate whatever damage you can — before the mad king tires of your sanity and fires you.

This paradox is one tragic outcome of Trumpism. It is generally a bad and dangerous idea for appointed officials to put their judgment above an elected official’s. And yet it would have been irresponsible for Mattis, Kelly, Tillerson and others not to follow their own judgments in cases where an incompetent, delusional or corrupt president was threatening the national interest.

Consider the case of former White House counsel Donald McGahn. According to the Mueller report, McGahn complained to then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus that Trump was trying to get him to “do crazy s–t.” McGahn (thankfully) told investigators he ignored presidential orders he took to be illegal.

Or consider a negative illustration. When it came to pressuring Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, the only morally mature adults in the room (and on the phone) were quite junior in rank. They expressed their concerns upward. But those above them — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney — had learned the lesson about officials fired for an excess of conscience. They apparently looked the other way as a friendly country was squeezed for political reasons.

On the whole, I’m glad that responsible officials such as Kelly and Mattis stayed as long as they did to prevent damage to the country. But I also think they have a moral obligation to come out before the 2020 election and say what they know about Trump’s unfitness. If Biden is the nominee, they might even get together and endorse him. But, in any case, if they believe Trump is a danger to the national interest, they eventually have a duty to say something. Saving the country requires no less.

As for Haley, she has now signaled to Trump Republicans that she was not a part of the “deep state,” thus clearing away a barrier to ambition. All she had to do was to ignore her conscience, betray her colleagues and injure her country. A small price to pay for such a brilliant political future.

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Haley’s ridiculously disingenuous performance on Today when grilled by Savannah Guthrie about the facts was worthy of her new role model, “Don the Con.”

Although you wouldn’t know it from the sycophantic Haley, political appointees, including Cabinet Members, actually take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the U.S., not the President. They are also first and foremost public servants paid by the People, not personal retainers of Trump as Haley, Barr, Pompeo, and others have functioned. I’d actually put Kelly and Tillerson in that category too; they certainly made a mess out of things at DHS and State, respectively, by putting the President’s xenophobic political policies before the law and the public interest.

And, if they in fact thought the President was endangering the U.S., they have kept it a secret after leaving. Compare these tawdry performances with those of the career public servants who have spoken out about Trump’s misdeeds even at the likely cost of their careers. And, unlike the stream of political appointees who have left in various stages of disgrace, they probably don’t have lucrative private sector jobs and/or fat book contracts awaiting them.

Expect Haley to “repackage herself” as a “powerful woman” and eventually as a Presidential candidate. She should be met with the same contempt as Kirstjen Nielsen and the few other GOP women who penetrated the Trump GOP’s “White Men Only Club” only to choose pandering to its corrupt leader over the welfare of our nation and advancement of humanity.

PWS

11-12-19

SEN. CORNYN (R-TX) OK WITH ETHNIC CLEANSING OF KURDS AS LONG AS NO AMERICAN GETS HURT — Genocide (Particularly On Former Allies) Can Get Messy, So Best Get Out Of The Way So You Don’t Get Splattered With Blood On Your Way Out!

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/john-cornyn-defends-trump-kurds_n_5db1a0f3e4b0131fa99a9fba

Hayley Miller reports for HuffPost:

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) defended President Donald Trump’s widely condemned decision to withdraw American troops from northern Syria, claiming it was an appropriate move if Turkey was “trying to ethnically cleanse” U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in the region.

“If Turkey was planning on coming into northern Syria and trying to ethnically cleanse the Kurds, and U.S. troops were caught in the middle, I am not completely convinced that it was a bad idea to get them out of harm’s way,” Cornyn told reporters Wednesday, reported The Dallas Morning News.

He added, however, that he wishes there had been “more consultation with Congress and others and our allies in the region.”

The Republican lawmaker’s comments came just hours after Trump announced he was lifting sanctions against Turkey, which agreed to a cease-fire against the Kurds in northeast Syria. Trump took credit for the deal, though Democrats and some Republicans say his decision to upend American foreign policy in the region enabled Turkey to launch a military offensive against the Kurds earlier this month.

Fighting between Turkey and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the main U.S. ally in the fight against the self-declared Islamic State in Syria, has resulted in the deaths of dozens of people and the displacement of thousands more.

During the fighting, Turkish-backed Arab fighters killed Hevrin Khalaf, the head of a Kurdish political party. A militant group posted a gruesome video of her execution online.

Foreign policy experts warned Trump’s decision to essentially abandon the Kurds could lead to their genocide by Turkey, which considers them to be terrorist insurgents. The House overwhelmingly passed a resolution last week to condemn the president’s move.

But Trump patted himself on the back Wednesday, claiming the U.S. and “nobody else” was responsible for avoiding all-out war in northern Syria.

“We have done them a great service and we’ve done a great job for all of them,” Trump said of Turkey, Syria and the Kurds. “And now, we’re getting out. … Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand.”

Cornyn told reporters Wednesday that things need to “play out a little bit” before he could say whether he felt Trump’s decision to lift sanctions was the right move.

Asked Thursday about his “ethnically cleanse” remark, Cornyn appeared to walk it back some.

“I wasn’t very clear,” he told HuffPost. “If the U.S. isn’t committed to stay in Syria, getting our troops out of harm’s way where they might be injured or killed during the inevitable conflict between the Turks and the Kurds was something I was concerned about.”

Igor Bobic contributed reporting.

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Start a war, abandon your allies, give away their homes in a cease fire, protect the oil fields, lend a hand to Erdogan, Putin, and Assad, three of the worst autocrats around (but not as inept as “autocrat wannabe” Trump). Now that’s a foreign policy that the GOP can be proud of.

Also, since we have declared Syria to be of “no particular concern” to us, for just whom are we “protecting” the Syrian oil fields: Putin? Assad? Erdogan? Iran?

And from whom? An ISIS that was once largely beaten but that now has been rejuvenated by Trump’s treacherous policies?

PWS

10-24-19

“IRREPARABLE HARM” – Trump’s Treachery Unleashes A Totally Predictable Military & Human Rights Disaster In Syria, Hands Another Victory To Putin!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/trump-had-one-foreign-policy-success-he-just-threw-it-away/2019/10/14/165c96cc-ee87-11e9-89eb-ec56cd414732_story.html

From the Washington Post:

By Editorial Board

Oct. 14, 2019 at 5:24 p.m. EDT

UNTIL NOW, it was possible to hope that the damage caused by President Trump’s terrible incompetence, ignorance and impulsivity in foreign policy was largely theoretical, and possibly reparable. That is no longer true. The cost of his latest Syria blunder is unfolding before our eyes: Innocent lives lost. U.S. servicemen and -women betrayed. Butchering dictators emboldened. Dangerous terrorists set free. A ghastly scene is playing out, and it almost surely will get worse.

How often have Mr. Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress berated President Barack Obama for allowing Syria to cross his “red line” without dire consequences? None of them is entitled ever to mention that again.

Mr. Trump — with no consideration, no warning, no consultation with allies, no regard for the other nations that have fought alongside the United States and risked their men and women in the fight — has turned tail. In the past two years, courageous U.S. troops cooperated with our Kurdish allies to defeat the deadly Islamic State caliphate. These allies lost more than 11,000 men and women killed; the United States, a dozen. It was a rare U.S. success in the Middle East.

AD

The president has thrown it all away. His surrender is so hasty that U.S. forces could not execute a long-standing plan to take dozens of high-profile Islamic State detainees with them; we can expect to hear from those terrorists before long, in the region, in Europe or in the United States. The Islamic State is likely to exert its malign force again. The allies who fought alongside us are being slaughtered, and noncombatant women and children, too. Iran is strengthened, which threatens Israel. The murderous Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is strengthened, too. Russia is taking charge. America’s adversaries could not have scripted a better outcome.

Mr. Trump likes to preen and posture as a champion of American fighters. But what more bitter medicine could any commander in chief administer to U.S. troops than ordering them to abandon the comrades who fought alongside them? He likes to preen, too, as a great enemy of Iran, and even as he runs from Syria he is ordering1,800 U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia, ostensibly to deter Iran. But that deployment, while proving the utter incoherence of his claim of “ending wars in the Middle East,” will have far less effect on Iran than the U.S. pullout from Syria, which opens the door for it to swell its influence there, on Israel’s border.

And speaking of preening: Republican senators such as Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.), who have cheered and celebrated Mr. Trump and his national security team, now huff and puff about imposing sanctions on Turkey as punishment for its invasion. Mr. Trump said Monday that he now supports such sanctions. But only one week ago he greenlighted Turkey’s incursion, and on Sunday he further encouraged it with his announcement of a hasty U.S. withdrawal. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan bears responsibility for Turkey’s depredations, of course. But if there is any coherence — or morality — in Mr. Trump’s position, he is doing a good job of concealing it.

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All the King’s horses and all the King’s men won’t be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again! And certainly “economic sanctions” won’t stop the Turkish onslaught. The only thing that might stop it is an alliance among the Kurds, Assad, and Putin. Obviously, Trump has handed Vladi another big victory.

Courtside had this one pegged from the git go! https://immigrationcourtside.com/2019/10/08/sycophant-sen-l-graham-r-sc-wakes-up-after-two-year-slumber-shocked-that-trump-has-betrayed-our-allies/.

PWS

10-15-19

SYCOPHANT SEN. L. GRAHAM (R-SC) WAKES UP AFTER TWO-YEAR SLUMBER, SHOCKED THAT TRUMP HAS BETRAYED OUR ALLIES!

From USA Today:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/10/07/trump-defends-syria-withdrawal/3896039002/

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Here’s Trump’s brilliant plan. Allow notorious Turkish strongman Erdogan, who happened to show up at a Trump Hotel opening in Turkey, to annihilate our loyal allies against ISIS (and before that Saddam), the Kurds. Then, destroy the Turkish economy because they annihilated the Kurds like they said they would do. That way, we wipe out two of our dwindling number of allies in the Middle East and insure the re-emergence of ISIS. We also should be able to guarantee the death of many refugees in Syria and cruel and inhuman abuse of others. What could possibly go wrong?

As for GOP bottom-feeder Graham, Trump’s betrayal of American institutions, illegal attacks on his American political opponents, insult to the memory of John McCain, taunting of Congress, dehumanization of immigrants and asylum seekers, his overt racism, and his 10,000+ documented lies, “No problemo.”

But, betray an ally halfway around the world, that’s “crossing the line.”

LG’s learning the “downside” of enabling a kakistocracy led by a dangerous, deranged clown. But, I’m sure that won’t stop him from serving as Trump’s caddy on their next golf outing, while Kurds are being slaughtered by Turks.

PWS

10-08-19

🇺🇸Due Process Forever!

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