"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals PAUL WICKHAM SCHMIDT and DR. ALICIA TRICHE, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
Clarence Thomas Hikes Price of Supreme Court Decisions to Keep Pace with Inflation
By Andy Borowitz @ The New YorkerThomas
Andy Borowitz Political Satirist The New Yorker
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Citing “unfortunate economic realities,” Clarence Thomas is hiking the price of Supreme Court decisions to keep up with inflation.
The jurist disclosed his new rate card in a mass e-mail sent to more than a hundred super-donors.
“I have tried to keep my prices reasonable, but, as inflation proves more stubborn than predicted, I have no choice but to adjust my rates accordingly,” he wrote.
“Sadly, the days of shredding civil rights in exchange for ten private-jet flights are over,” he added.
It remains to be seen whether the billionaires who received Thomas’s e-mail will tolerate his steeper prices or whether they will explore a budget option such as Neil Gorsuch.
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Predictably, no public hearings were held on the Justice’s sudden rate hike, which blindsided many right wing billionaires with business before the Court! “We believed in good faith that Clarence & Ginni were bought and paid for at least until the end of the upcoming term,” complained one super donor. “I mean, if the guy demands any more private flights to fancy vacation retreats, we’ll probably have to consider buying him his own private jetliner. Perhaps, he should spend at least a little more time in his chambers in D.C. spouting originalism and obstructing justice! After all, that’s what we’re paying him for!”😨**
Unhappily, in the days of GOP mega-corruption, satire has become almost a lost art.
🇺🇸 Due Process Forever!
PWS
08-11-23
** The above paragraph is fictionalized. Any resemblance to any real person, persons, organizations, and/or situations is purely coincidental and entirely unintended.
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Fox News Channel announced that it has completed its acquisition of the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy.
Rupert Murdoch, the network’s majority owner, said that he was “delighted” by the purchase of McCarthy and noted that Fox had snapped him up at an attractively low price.
“It helped that there were no other bidders,” he said.
But, even as Fox moved McCarthy onto its corporate ledger, some Wall Street analysts predicted that the network would rue the day that it acquired the congressman.
“Kevin McCarthy will be Rupert Murdoch’s worst investment since MySpace,” one analyst said.
The Attorney General submitted to the test after coming into contact with career Justice Department prosecutors who were found to be integrity carriers.
By Andy Borowitz
Photograph by Drew Angerer / Getty
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a test result that he called “a tremendous relief,” the Attorney General, Bill Barr, has tested negative for integrity, Barr confirmed on Friday.
Barr submitted to the test after learning that he had come into contact with career Justice Department prosecutors who were found to be integrity carriers.
“When I learned that there were still people at the Justice Department with integrity, I was understandably furious,” Barr told reporters. “I told them to go home at once.”
Barr said that he was putting into place new protocols that would require Justice Department employees to be tested for integrity before entering the building.
“I thought that anyone with integrity had already left the Justice Department, but apparently I was mistaken,” he said. “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”
Although he was elated to learn that he had tested negative for integrity, Barr said that he shuddered to think how close he came to contracting the dreaded virtue.
“Having integrity would have made it impossible for me to work for President Trump,” he said.
Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.
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I suspect that many current DOJ employees couldn’t tell Andy’s “satire” from the outrageous truth of the absolute disaster every day at the institution formerly known as the Department of “Justice.” More on that later on.
AMERICA (The Borowitz Report)—In order to better coördinate their efforts to combat the coronavirus, the nation’s governors are considering the extraordinary step of forming a country.
The radical proposal is an unusual bipartisan effort, spearheaded by the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, and the Republican Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine.
“Mike and I were bidding against each other for masks and ventilators, and I was, like, ‘Mike this is crazy,’ ” Whitmer said. “ ‘It would be so much better if we just worked together and formed a country.’ ”
DeWine said that Whitmer’s proposal of creating a country out of the fifty states “made a lot of sense.”
“It was one of those moments where someone throws out a nutty idea and you think, ‘Hold on, let’s think on that for a second,’ ” he said.
While the idea of the fifty states coming together to form a country is still in the embryonic stage, DeWine said that the states would ideally create a “federal government” led by a “President.”
“We’re all in agreement that it would be amazing to have a President right now,” DeWine said.
A straw poll of the governors indicates that the front-runner for President of this yet-to-be-named country is one of their own: Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York.
“Andrew keeps saying that he doesn’t want to be President,” Whitmer said. “And I’m, like, ‘Dude, you already are.’ ”
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Just after I read this, I was pelted with notifications that Governors in the Northeast and on the West Coast were banding together to develop cooperative regional approaches to restarting their regional economies consistent with best health practices.
After recently claiming that he had no authority to order a nationwide shutdown, Trump now says that reopening is his sole decision to make.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The National Incompetence Stockpiles, the federal reserves of inanity and ineptitude to be drawn upon in times of crisis, are at “full capacity,” the Government Accountability Office announced on Saturday.
According to the G.A.O., the Incompetence Stockpiles are so well stocked at the moment that they are in danger of overflowing.
“The sheer tonnage of failure and impotence that is being dumped into the stockpiles on a daily basis is straining their ability to contain it,” the G.A.O. statement read.
Davis Logsdon, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has written the definitive book about the National Incompetence Stockpiles, said that the nation’s futility reserves stand at their highest levels ever, eclipsing the record stockpiles established during the tenure of President George W. Bush.
“The Bush Administration tapped the National Incompetence Stockpiles when it invaded Iraq and responded to Hurricane Katrina,” Logsdon said. “At the time, it seemed as though the stockpiles would never be fully replenished, and that makes the Trump Administration’s achievement all the more striking.”
According to the statutes governing the National Incompetence Stockpiles, individual states may draw on the federal reserves of idiocy in times of emergency, but so far the governors of states like Georgia, Texas, and Florida have been able to rely on vast stockpiles of their own.
Andy Borowitz is a Times best-selling author and a comedian who has written for The New Yorker since 1998. He writes The Borowitz Report, a satirical column on the news.
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I can hardly wait for Jared to get the “Medal of Freedom” from “Big Daddy!”🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Dr. Anthony Fauci has urged a non-essential employee of the White House Coronavirus Task Force to go home immediately, Fauci confirmed on Friday.
Speaking to reporters, the esteemed virologist said that he made the decision to expel the worker for “the health and safety of others.”
“He said that he felt fine coming to work every day,” Fauci said. “I told him, ‘You may feel fine, but by coming into work you are endangering the lives of countless others.’ ”
Fauci said that his decision to send the non-essential worker home was based on the most recent scientific findings.
“What we’re learning is that breathing and talking can put lives in jeopardy, and this one worker did more breathing and talking than anyone else on the team,” he said.
The employee is expected to spend fourteen hours a day in isolation watching television, a two-hour increase from his normal routine.
Person Who Is Always Troubled or Concerned Should Get Different Job, Workplace Experts Say
Andy BorowitzFebruary 10, 2020
MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—An employee who regularly self-identifies as “troubled” or “concerned” would benefit from seeking a different job, leading workplace experts said on Monday.
Professor Davis Logsdon, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Workplace Health Institute, cited the case of a Maine woman who appeared to undergo a traumatic experience every time she was faced with a difficult decision at work.
“According to her own account, each decision followed an excruciating period of existential torment,” Logsdon said. “Any employee who finds decision-making this harrowing should clearly consider working somewhere else.”
Logsdon said that the woman’s frequent episodes of being troubled and/or concerned usually resulted in an unsatisfactory outcome.
“At the end of her nightmarish deliberation process, she lost the capacity for individual judgment,” he said. “She just went along with what everyone else in the office decided to do, regardless of the harm that such a decision might cause.”
Consequently, the researchers at the Workplace Health Institute concluded that any person who approaches his or her job with the levels of self-doubt and anxiety regularly exhibited by the Maine woman should find a new job that requires no decision-making whatsoever.
“In her current position, she is useless,” Logsdon said.
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All too true! At least most of the other GOP toadies didn’t give it two seconds of thought before enthusiastically and boisterously selling out America. Why “beat around the bush” if you’re in the “Party of Putin” and “Moscow Mitch” has already told you how to vote to avoid a “public flogging?”
JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI (The Borowitz Report)—Celebrating her election victory on Tuesday night, U.S. Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith said that, despite predictions that her state was ready to turn the page on its shameful past, “I never lost faith in Mississippi’s racists.”
“For weeks, we’ve been hearing national pundits say that Mississippi was ready to enter the twenty-first century,” Hyde-Smith told a crowd of supporters at her victory rally. “Tonight, with your help, we proved them wrong.”
Hyde-Smith said that, despite the media’s unearthing of a cavalcade of embarrassing comments and actions from her past, “I never doubted that, at the end of the day, the people of Mississippi would listen to the racist voices in their heads.”
Choking back tears, Hyde-Smith thanked her supporters for honoring Mississippi’s storied heritage of hatred and cruelty.
“Mississippi voters do not want to tear down the relics of our Confederate past,” she said. “As such a relic, I am eternally grateful.”
Exit polls showed that Hyde-Smith performed extremely well with voters who described themselves as bigots, and dominated among those who could not correctly spell “Mississippi.”
MADISON, WISCONSIN (The Borowitz Report)—A Wisconsin man with no marketable skills was unable to keep his job on Tuesday night, sources close to the man have confirmed.
The man, Scott Walker, had been an employee of Koch Industries since 2010 until he was unceremoniously dismissed.
“No one likes to lose his job, but, really, Scott has nothing to complain about,” one source said. “When you have no useful skills whatsoever but you manage to hang onto a job for eight years, that’s a pretty good run.”
Although Walker faces a job market that will be daunting for a man with only rudimentary literacy and scant understanding of math, a spokesperson for Wisconsin’s teachers said that they stand “ready and willing” to give him the education he so sorely needs.
“As teachers, we see it as our duty to educate all of Wisconsin’s students, even super challenging ones like Scott Walker,” the spokesperson said.
TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA (The Borowitz Report)—In a hastily called press conference on Thursday evening, Florida Governor Rick Scott accused Democrats of nefariously plotting to undo the Republican Party’s highly successful voter-suppression effort.
“As Republicans, we have worked tirelessly to intimidate, discourage, and otherwise disenfranchise millions of Florida voters,” a visibly enraged Scott said. “We are not about to let Democrats swoop in at the last minute and ruin all of that fine work.”
Scott angrily singled out the Broward County and Palm Beach County supervisors for their “rampant enforcement of the right to vote.”
“They are literally finding votes by people we are a hundred per cent sure we had scared away from the voting booths,” he said. “This will not stand.”
The Florida governor said that if Democrats think that they can undermine the Republicans’ arduous and painstaking efforts to suppress votes in Florida, “they better think again.”
“I will not sit idly by while every vote is counted,” Scott said. “This is Florida, goddammit.”
Photograph by John Leyba / The Denver Post / Getty
NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The National Football League has expanded its list of banned substances to include the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, the league confirmed on Wednesday.
Although the N.F.L. has long banned substances such as anabolic steroids and growth hormones, the First Amendment is believed to be the only right guaranteed by the Constitution to be included on the list.
Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, said that, by adding the First Amendment to the list of banned substances, the N.F.L was establishing a “policy of zero tolerance on tolerance.”
In order to enforce the ban, Goodell said that players would be tested periodically to determine whether they had used words, gestures, or facial expressions that are strictly prohibited under the new rule.
Speaking at the White House, Donald Trump applauded the league for banning the approximately seventeen hundred N.F.L. players from exercising freedom of speech, and expressed hope that the ban could eventually be expanded to include the other three hundred and twenty-five million Americans.
All too true! On the same day he was “outed” by a Federal Judge as a “First Amendment Scofflaw” for attempting to ban dissent on his Twitter account, Trump said that those who actually complied with the First Amendment with their protests should be removed from the country. It would be funny, if it weren’t so tragic.
Trump degrades America every day he is in office. We are truly becoming the “Banana Republic of America!”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it “maybe the worst deal ever,” Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that he is considering pulling the United States out of the United States Constitution.
“I’ve seen a lot of bad deals in my life, but this Constitution is a total mess,” he said. “We need to tear it up and start over.”
Trump was scathing in his remarks about the two-hundred-and-twenty-nine-year-old document, singling out for special scorn its insistence on three branches of government. “The branches thing is maybe the worst part of this deal,” he said. “The first thing we do when we pull out of the Constitution is get rid of two of those branches.”
He also called the First Amendment “something that really has to go.”
“No one in his right mind would put something like that in a Constitution,” he said. “Russia doesn’t have it. North Korea doesn’t have it. All the best countries don’t have it.”
He stopped short of accusing his predecessor, Barack Obama, of writing the United States Constitution, but said, “He’s working hard behind the scenes trying to save it, because he knows that the Constitution is very, very bad for me.”
Vowing to replace the Constitution with “a new, much, much better Constitution,” he acknowledged that there might be some elements of the original document worth salvaging. “We’re going to keep the Second Amendment,” he said, “and definitely the Fifth.”
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In a fit of pique, David and Charles Koch have unceremoniously listed House Speaker Paul Ryan for sale on the auction site eBay.
The Kochs, who reportedly had purchased Ryan for a sum estimated in the tens of millions, now seem likely to lose their entire investment.
According to Ryan’s listing on the auction site, the Kochs set a five-hundred-dollar asking price for the used congressman, a figure that, in light of the tepid bidding for him, seems optimistic.
“Granted, owning Paul Ryan doesn’t have the benefits that it’s had for David and Charles for all of these years, but the status of owning a former Speaker of the House has to be worth something,” one Koch associate said. “Certainly more than the current high bid of seventeen dollars.”
The eBay listing suggested several possible uses for the former House Speaker, including as a Halloween ornament or garden gnome.
MADISON (The Borowitz Report)—Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, said on Wednesday that he was “dismayed and alarmed” that people in his state had somehow become smarter despite substantial cuts in education.
“Ever since I took office, I have slashed education with the goal of making the voters of this state markedly dumber and incapable of critical thinking,” he told reporters. “Instead, what I am looking at is a doomsday scenario.”
Walker said that his cuts were based on a theory known as “trickle-up stupidity,” in which students in Wisconsin’s schools would become less informed and their ignorance would eventually infect their voting-age parents.
“Clearly, what looked like a can’t-miss plan on paper has not panned out,” he said.
Although Walker said that “it’s not time yet to press the panic button,” he warned that a so-called Smart Wave could be coming in his state.
“If Wisconsin voters continue to get smarter, that will be the end of me,” he said.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Calling it a “medical mystery of the first order,” scientists are baffled by the ability of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan to stand upright without the benefit of spines.
Doctors at the University of Minnesota Medical School, who have been studying the skeletal structures of both Republicans for months, believe that their ability to stand, walk, and even break into a brisk trot when confronted by reporters’ questions is “virtually inexplicable.”
“The fact that they can do these things without the aid of spines makes McConnell and Ryan anomalies in the animal kingdom,” said Dr. Davis Logsdon. “According to everything medical science teaches us, their bodies should be collapsing to the ground in two heaps.”
As the Minnesota scientists have struggled to solve the medical conundrum presented by the two invertebrate leaders, one theory that has gained traction is what Logsdon calls “the startled-deer hypothesis.”
“Just as a deer freezes in the headlights of a car and briefly appears statue-like, we believe that Ryan and McConnell’s bodies may retain their rigid structure out of terror alone,” he said. “In other words, fear is performing the function that a spine performs in other people.”
Calling it “just a theory,” Logsdon said that the anatomies of McConnell and Ryan require further study, and that there was growing public support for both men to be dissected.
