"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.
Rudy Giuliani has been suspended from practicing law in the state of New York.
Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and the former head prosecutor for the federal Southern District of New York, was suspended for making “false and misleading statements” about the election loss of his client, former President Donald Trump.
In a ruling sought by the Attorney Grievance Committee of the First Judicial Department (a mid-level appellate court in the state), a five judge panel implemented an interim suspension of Giuliani’s law license, pending further AGC proceedings.
The ruling, issued Thursday, takes effect immediately.
“There is uncontroverted evidence that respondent communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020,” the court wrote in its decision.
“These false statements were made to improperly bolster respondent’s narrative that due to widespread voter fraud, victory in the 2020 United States presidential election was stolen from his client. We conclude that respondent’s conduct immediately threatens the public interest and warrants interim suspension from the practice of law.”
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Read the full report at the link.
Could get here be just a little justice in the world after all? On the other hand, why are Jeff “Gonzo Apolcalypto” Sessions and “Billy the Bigot” Barr and a bunch of other corrupt Trump officials still walking free and practicing? A few might even be hanging around in USG jobs!
Jeff Sessions’ Cage by J.D. Crowe, Alabama Media Group/AL.com Republished under licenseBill Barr Consigliere Artist: Pat Bagley Salt Lake Tribune Reproduced under license
Judge Garland wonders whether there could be some “problems” with these guys and their corrupt agendas. Meanwhile, his DOJ continues to sink deeper into the muck every day! Hey, what’s the rush? It’s “only justice” and human lives at stake here! Garland seems to think that can’t compare with protecting important “Departmental prerogatives” to cover up past and perpetuate future injustices @ Justice! He’s wrong! Dead wrong in some cases!
Donald Trump never did much to hide his dangerous belief that the US justice department and the attorneys general who helmed it should serve as his own personal lawyers and follow his political orders, regardless of norms and the law.
Former senior DoJ officials say the former president aggressively prodded his attorneys general to go after his enemies, protect his friends and his interests, and these moves succeeded with alarming results until Trump’s last few months in office.
The martyr who may rise again: Christian right’s faith in Trump not shaken
But now with Joe Biden sitting in the Oval Office, Merrick Garland as attorney general and Democrats controlling Congress, more and more revelations are emerging about just how far Trump’s justice department went rogue. New inquiries have been set up to investigate the scale of wrongdoing.
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Trump’s disdain for legal principles and the constitution revealed itself repeatedly – especially during Bill Barr’s tenure as attorney general, during most of 2019 and 2020. During Barr’s term in office, Trump ignored the tradition of justice as a separate branch of government, and flouted the principle of the rule of law, say former top justice lawyers and congressional Democrats.
In Barr, Trump appeared to find someone almost entirely aligned with the idea of doing his bidding. Barr sought to undermine the conclusions of Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 elections, independent congressional oversight, and Trump critics in and out of government, while taking decisions that benefited close Trump allies.
But more political abuses have emerged, with revelations that – starting under attorney general Jeff Sessions in 2018 – subpoenas were issued in a classified leak inquiry to obtain communications records of top Democrats on the House intelligence committee. Targets were Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, who were investigating Kremlin election meddling, and also several committee staffers and journalists.
Democrats in Congress, as well as Garland, have forcefully denounced these Trumpian tactics. Garland has asked the department’s inspector general to launch his own inquiry, and examine the subpoenas involving members of Congress and the media. Congressional committees are eyeing their own investigations into the department’s extraordinary behavior.
“There was one thing after another where DoJ acted inappropriately and violated the fundamental principle that law enforcement must be even-handed. The DoJ must always make clear that no person is above the law,” said Donald Ayer, deputy attorney general in the George HW Bush administration.
Ayer thinks there could be more revelations to come. “The latest disclosure of subpoenas issued almost three years ago shows we don’t yet know the full extent of the misconduct that was engaged in.”
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Read the full article at the link. Once again, thanks to Don Ayer, a former colleague in both public and private practice, for speaking out!
Don Ayer American Lawyer Former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Photo: www.ali.org
The record of anti-immigrant, White Nationalist bias at EOIR and the DOJ’s “Dred Scott” approach to justice for asylum applicants and other migrants is crystal clear! Thanks to the NDPA, courageous journalists, some “inside sources,” and the remarkable number of rebuffs from Federal Courts, the record on misfeasance and bias at EOIR, OIL, and the SG’s Office is clear.
For example, there is no “issue” that Sessions’s “child separation policy” violated the Constitution, that he and other Government officials like Rod Rosenstein and Kristen Nielsen lied about it ( ‘We Need to Take Away Children,’ No Matter How Young, Justice Dept. Officials Said
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/us/politics/family-separation-border-immigration-jeff-sessions-rod-rosenstein.html?referringSource=articleShare), and that the DOJ attorneys defending this abomination at least failed to do “due diligence” and probably misrepresented to Federal Courts.
In many illegal child separation cases, as the Biden Administration is discovering, the damage is irreparable! Yet, only the the victims have suffered! The “perps” go about their daily business without accountability!
Every day, Garland’s lackadaisical approach to restoring “justice @ Justice” and his apparent indifference to individual human rights and fair judging continue to harm vulnerable asylum seekers and other individuals and disintegrate our legal system. It’s “not OK!”
Progressives and members of the NDPA must recognize, if they haven’t already, that they can’t count on Garland! They will have to continue to use litigation, legislation, oversight, FOIA, public opinion, and political pressure to get the immediate common sense progressive reforms and overdue personnel changes that Garland, Monaco, Gupta, and Clarke are avoiding. Garland might view “justice” as too abstract a concept to require his immediate attention. Many of us don’t agree!
“They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”
Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice, Supreme Court, March 1857, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857)
“Congress is entitled to set the conditions for an alien’s lawful entry into this country and that, as a result, an alien at the threshold of initial entry cannot claim any greater rights under the due process clause.”
Justice Samuel Alito, Department of Homeland Security v. Thuraissigiam, 591 U.S. ___ (2020)
Dred Scott (circa 1857) Public Realm — Black asylum seekers and other migrants aren’t celebrating the continuing disgraceful “Dred Scottification of the other” in Mayorkas’s “New American Gulag” and Garland’s “Miller Lite” Immigration “Courts” that aren’t “courts” at all!
Yacouba, a political activist in Ivory Coast, knew if he didn’t immediately flee his home country, he wouldn’t survive.
After being threatened, attacked and tortured by people sympathetic to those in power, Yacouba fled his country in 2018. He went to Brazil for a few years, then made a perilous trek through Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras and Mexico before finally arriving in the United States.
The journey was one of the two most challenging periods of his life. The second was being detained as a Black immigrant in the U.S.
As the nation celebrates Juneteenth — a day commemorating the emancipation of African Americans who had been enslaved in the United States — as a federal holiday for the first time, Black Americans and immigrants are fighting to dismantle institutional racism, including within the immigration system. Black immigrants are disproportionately detained, receive higher bond costs, and say they face racist treatment within detention centers.
Recognizing and celebrating the emancipation of slaves is vital, activists say ― but continuing to take down systemic racism needs to come with it.
“From an immigration perspective, Black immigrants face disproportionate levels of detention and exclusion,” Diana Konate, policy director at the advocacy group African Communities Together, said Thursday on a press call. “These can be life-threatening, as Black immigrants often get deported back to unsafe and dangerous conditions. While we celebrate the victories, we keep in mind that a lot of work remains.”
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Read the rest of Rowaida’s article at the link.
Every day that Garland, Monaco, Gupta, and Clarke drag their collective feet on ending “Dred Scottification,” racial bias, and xenophobia at EOIR diminishes their credibility on all racial and social justice issues. To date, Garland has appointed zero (O) progressive judges at EOIR, has only scratched the surface of the White Nationalist bias in decision-making in the Immigration Courts, and has failed to re-establish due process and the rule of law for Blacks and other migrants of color at the border.
Justice Alito and his colleagues in the majority disgracefully basically “dressed up” the core of Dred Scott dehumanization and bias in “21st century faux constitutional gobbledygook and intentional, disingenuous fictionalization!” Make no mistake: asylum seekers applying at our borders with their lives and humanity at stake are “persons” subject to our jurisdiction and are entitled to full Constitutional due process and statutory rights that are being denied to them every day, currently by the Biden Administration.
While Alito & Co. are wrong, DEAD WRONG in all too many cases, nothing in their dishonest and misguided “jurisprudence” prevents Garland from providing due process to individuals, regardless of status, in Immigration Court and to ending the racism and dehumanization underneath both the mess at EOIR and the cowardly abdication of duty by the Supremes’ majority in Thuraissigiam! In human rights, you either solve the problem or become part of it. And, experts, journalists, and historians are making a permanent record of the actions of the Supremes and the Biden Administration when democracy and racial justice are under stress!
You don’t have to look very far to “connect the dots” between Alito’s dismissive attitude toward the human rights of Asians and other asylum seekers of color and the increase in hate crimes directed against Asian Americans and unfair policing of African Americans. Once courts and government officials endorse “dehumanization of the other based largely on ethnicity” the “protections” and “distinctions” of citizenship tend to also vanish. If the lives of migrants of color can be declared worthless, what difference does citizenship mean for those of the same ethnic heritage that Alito deems below humanity? Obviously, the Trump kakistocracy’s attack on migrants of color was just a “place holder” for their attack on the rights of all persons of color in America!
How can Garland’s DOJ demand racial justice in state law enforcement while operating America’s most notorious “Jim Crow Court System?”
James “Jim” Crow Symbol of American Racism — He still “rules the roost” at Garland’s EOIR!
It’s time for all civil rights and civil liberties organizations to join forces in demanding an end to bias and “Dred Scottification of the other” in Garland’s disgracefully dysfunctional Immigration “Courts.” Not rocket science!🚀 Just human decency, common sense, available (yet ignored) progressive expertise, and Con Law 101!
Judge Merrick B. Garland, U.S. Attorney General — Why is this guy . . . Official White House Photo Public RealmCovering up for this guy . . . Lowering The Barr by Randall Enos, Easton, CT Republished By LicenseIs what this guy wants to know! — Dean Erwin Chemerinsky UC Berkeley Law PHOTO: law.Berkeley.edu
The Biden administration is making a serious mistake in placing the self-interest of the Justice Department ahead of the people’s right to know if former Atty. Gen. William Barr acted to cover up Donald Trump’s possible engagement in obstruction of justice.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., in early May ordered the release of a crucial Justice Department memo that will shed light on Barr’s conduct and whether he acted inappropriately. Rather than comply with the judge’s command and disclose the document, the Biden Justice Department is appealing the order in an effort to keep the memo secret.
In March 2019, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III delivered his report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election to then-Atty. Gen. Barr. While keeping the report secret, Barr sent a letter to congressional leaders purporting to “summarize the principal conclusions.” Barr said that Mueller “did not draw a conclusion — one way or the other — as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction,” and that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” Trump then declared that he was fully exonerated.
Barr said that he had reached his conclusion “in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other Department lawyers.” A Freedom of Information Act request was filed by a watchdog group to obtain the OLC memo that purportedly was the basis for Barr’s judgment that the Mueller report exonerated Trump of obstruction of justice.
A reading of the Mueller report indicates that Barr’s statements were a gross mischaracterization of the evidence it presented. There was substantial evidence that Trump had engaged in obstruction of justice and Mueller said that he offered no conclusion only because Justice Department rules prevented indicting a sitting president.
Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson reviewed the OLC memo and concluded that there was no legal basis for withholding it from release. Indeed, she was sharply critical of the Justice Department’s arguments for secrecy. She said that the “affidavits” submitted in favor of withholding the document “are so inconsistent with evidence in the record, they are not worthy of credence.” She said that her review of the documents led her to conclude “that not only was the Attorney General being disingenuous then, but DOJ has been disingenuous to this Court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege.” She said that the agency’s “redactions and incomplete explanations obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum.”
In plain English, she slammed the Justice Department for misleading the court in trying to keep the document secret.
This issue is central to a government operating under the rule of law: Did the attorney general act to deceive Congress and the American people to protect Trump from being seen as having engaged in obstruction of justice? The OLC memo is key to understanding what happened.
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Read the full op-Ed at the link.
During his Senate confirmation hearings Judge Garland presented himself well and indicated a sound understanding of justice, the proper role of the Attorney General, and the public interest. However, that now appears to have been largely skillful misdirection.
Since actually being sworn in, Garland has, surprisingly and sadly, conducted business largely without regard to progressive values, expert advice, common sense, or the public interest.
As many of us who served at the USDOJ over the years learned, leadership often has a tendency to confuse institutional protection, political agendas, and their own self-interest with advancing the public good, which is actually the AG’s sole job.
If there is one thing the DOJ has never wanted, under any Administration, it’s public scrutiny. That’s probably why it was so easy for the Trump Administration to get cooperation from career DOJ attorneys, who should have known better, for its corrupt policies.
I personally don’t make much of Scott’s ability to reason. This is the same man who said in March that “woke supremacy,” whatever that is, “is as bad as white supremacy.” There is no world in which recent efforts at enlightenment can be equated to enslavement, lynching and mass incarceration. None.
It seems to me that the disingenuousness on the question of racism is largely a question of language. The question turns on another question: “What, to you, is America?” Is America the people who now inhabit the land, divorced from its systems and its history? Or, is the meaning of America inclusive of those systems and history?
When people say that America is a racist country, they don’t necessarily mean that all or even most Americans are consciously racist. However, it is important to remember that nearly half the country just voted for a full-on racist in Donald Trump, and they did so by either denying his racism, becoming apologists for it, or applauding it. What do you call a country thus composed?
Historically, however, there is no question that the country was founded by racists and white supremacists, and that much of the early wealth of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and much of the early expansion came at the expense of the massacre of the land’s Indigenous people and broken treaties with them.
Gathering the dead after the Colfax massacre, published in Harper’s Weekly, May 10, 1873
Eight of the first 10 presidents personally enslaved Africans. In 1856, the chief justice of the United States wrote in the infamous ruling on the Dred Scott case that Black people “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
The country went on to fight a Civil War over whether some states could maintain slavery as they wished. Even some of the people arguing for, and fighting for, an end to slavery had expressed their white supremacist beliefs.
Abraham Lincoln said during his famous debates against Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 that among white people and Black ones “there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.”
Some will concede the historical point and insist on the progress point, arguing that was then and this is now, that racism simply doesn’t exist now as it did then. I would agree. American racism has evolved and become less blunt, but it has not become less effective. The knife has simply been sharpened. Now systems do the work that once required the overt actions of masses of individual racists.
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As Mark Twain once put it: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
Being imprecise or undecided with our language on this subject contributes to the murkiness — and to the myth that the question of whether America is racist is difficult to answer and therefore the subject of genuine debate among honest intellectuals.
Saying that America is racist is not a radical statement. If that requires a longer explanation or definition, so be it. The fact, in the end, is not altered.
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Read Blow’s full article at the link.
Four things that are clear to me:
The “history” that most of us in my generation learned in high school was “whitewashed;”
The monumental achievements of non-white Americans, women, and children which allowed this country to exist, prosper, and flourish have consistently been ignored or downplayed;
America still has race issues;
The GOP, in particular, has failed to come to grips with the issue of race in 21st century America (apologists Scott & Graham notwithstanding).
🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process For All Persons Under Law, Forever!
Meanwhile, government watchdog groups expressed concerns over two people whose initial conversion requests had since been approved.
One such conversion was that of Carl Risch, whose October conversion request to be the deputy director, the No. 2 job, at the Executive Office for Immigration Review within the Department of Justice (a civil service job), was approved in December. Risch had been an assistant secretary for consular affairs at the State Department, a political job. His new job came with a $10,000 raise.
“It’s a red flag when there are multiple people being converted to jobs at a single entity. It really raises an even larger concern,” Stier, of the Partnership for Public Service, said. “The process is supposed to be that a political appointee in no way has a leg up on the competition for a career job, but when you see multiple go to the same agency, you really have to wonder how it can be possible that the best qualified individuals are not once, but multiple times, people who are political appointees.”
Risch did not respond to multiple requests for comment. EOIR spokeswoman Kathryn Mattingly said Risch went through the standard pre-hiring review process with the OPM and that the agency had approved his new position.
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Read the full article at the link.
So, the folks who saved due process and stood up for the Constitution and racial justice while Judge Garland was enjoying his cushy ivory tower job at the D.C. Circuit over the past four years remain on the outside, twisting in the wind ⚰️ while their clients and colleagues suffer daily abuse in “Garland’s Star Chambers!” Nice touch!
Meanwhile, Garland hands out the big bucks and a hideout for a notoriously unqualified Trump/Miller political hack imported from the DOS. What does Risch know about immigrant justice or court management? Nothing? Oh, but why is that a problem at EOIR?
He occupies what is supposed to be a key senior management position in America’s most dysfunctional “court system” — running a simply astounding 1.3 million (known) case, largely self-created backlog, grinding out sloppy, unprofessional, biased opinions regularly rejected by even conservative Courts of Appeals, setting horrible anti-immigrant precedents and endangering the lives, health, and safety of those who are caught up in EOIR’s continuing White Nationalist cesspool of cruelty, mismanagement, and gross incompetence?
Judge Garland: “Go faster Carl and David (Garland BIA Chair Wetmore), see how much it takes to make this worthless respondent scream! Remember what your mentor Stephen Miller taught you about the lives and rights of ‘the other.’ Why do you think I’m paying you the ‘big bucks’ and letting you ‘burrow in’ if not to punish and deter those who dare seek due process and humane treatment in MY wholly-owned Star Chambers! I couldn’t have done this at the DC Circuit, but here there are NO RULES, except those we make up for our own benefit, and I aim to keep it that way!”
Is it any wonder that immigrant justice and racial justice remain in free-fall under Biden and Garland?
Let’s lay it on the line! By now, Garland should have cancelled all the Trump-era precedents (“day 1 stuff”), cleaned house at EOIR HQ, and transferred the entire BIA to somewhere where they can inflict no more damage on the American legal system!
That would also have sent a powerful“signal” to the many Immigration Judges who have established “asylum free zones” in Immigration Courts throughout the U.S. over the past two Administrations that there will be a return of due process and fundamental fairness for asylum seekers and other immigrants at EOIR.
Judges can get with the program, start granting asylum and other protection as the law requires, thereby reducing backlogs the “old fashioned way” — consistent with due process and fundamental fairness. Or, they can ship out and sign up with Stephen Miller’s “Aryian Nation Legal Team” — where it appears that many of them would be more at home.
Garland should have brought in folks already on the payroll like Judges Dana Marks, Noel Brennan, & Amiena Khan, all experts in due process, judicial management, immigration, and human rights laws, all of whom have demonstrated true leadership, consistent courage, and independence throughout their distinguished careers, on at least a temporary basis to start restoring justice, rationality, and order in the Immigration Courts.
They would already have identified qualified sitting judges who know how to grant asylum to serve as Acting Appellate Judges at the BIA to start turning things around by enforcing due process and issuing precedents that advance, rather than retard, due process, fundamental, fairness, and judicial efficiency.
Meanwhile, they would be developing legitimate merit selection criteria to recruit and hire as judges practical experts who will fairly and efficiently apply due process and fundamental fairness to all asylum seekers and other respondents, regardless of race, color, or creed. These criteria could be used to recruit andhire a diverse progressive group of permanent Appellate Judges and Immigration Judges, to determine which “probationary IJs” should be retained, and eventually to re-compete all existing IJ positions to insure a real, diverse, independent, due-process focused, Immigration Judiciary comprised of the “best and brightest” American law has to offer!
Greg Chen (AILA) and Professor Peter Moskowitz (Cardozo Law) should be on the EOIR payroll implementing their very achievable program for drastically slashing the unnecessary backlog without stomping on anyone’s rights.
Garland should already have hired Professor Michele Pistone(Villanova Law, VIISTA) to develop quality, due process oriented training programs for everyone at EOIR.
Instead, Garland is bankrolling the current crew of proven incompetents, holdovers, hangers on, and Trump/Miller White Nationalists. In other words, he’s wasting our taxpayer money, destroying the lives and futures of the most vulnerable (and often most deserving) among us, undermining racial and social justice in America, and abusing and endangering the health and safety of members of the NDPA trying to bring some semblance of the rule of law and human decency into our disgustingly dysfunctional Immigration Courts.
Could it get any worse? How?
Think about this! Neo-Nazi Stephen Miller and his fellow White Nationalists apparently were so impressed with the effective legal work done by courageous immigration/human rights/due process advocates in blocking many parts of his racist authoritarian agenda — basically the New Due Process Army (“NDPA”) and its “Senior Fighting Division” The Round Table of Former Immigration Judges — that they are forming their very own neo-Nazi legal advocacy group to help GOP AGs stymie any attempt by the Biden Administration to promote racial justice, social justice, and immigrant justice.
Given the rather incompetent (not to mention ethically questionable) performance of many DOJ attorneysduring the Trump regime, Garland is going to need all the help he can get to fend off Miller and the GOP. Rather than enlisting members of the NDPA on his team, letting them solve problems, and actively soliciting their support and alliance on litigation, he is turning them into highly motivated opponents!
How dumb and counterproductive is that! Turn your would-be friends into enemies? Sounds like something only a tone-deaf Dem politico could pull off!
I’m not a politico. But, I do understand the necessity in politics, as in almost any field, of being able to distinguish your friends from your enemies. Perhaps, Judge Garland has spent so much time in the ivory tower that he has forgotten how to play the game out here in the real world.
I’ve been hanging around the Washington legal scene for almost 50 years now. In that time, I might have witnessed a more inept start by an Attorney General of either party. But, really, I can’t remember when!
🇺🇸⚖️🗽Due Process Forever! If the NDPA must take the fight to end ☠️⚰️ deadly “Clown Courts” 🤡 to Judge Garland, so be it!
In an absolutely stunning statement, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) admitted in a radio interview that he wasn’t frightened by white insurrectionists’ attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 — but said he would have been “concerned” had they been Black.
Johnson accurately predicted that his racist statement to conservative radio host Joe Pags on Thursday would get him “into trouble.”
The senator noted that he has been criticized for previous remarks that he “never felt threatened” by the attack.
He added: “Now, had the tables been turned, Joe, and this’ll get me in trouble — had the tables been turned, and President Trump won the election, and those were tens of thousands of Black Lives Matter and antifa protesters, I might have been a little concerned.”
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Read the full article at the link.
Oh Wisconsin, how far you have fallen to inflict this racist idiot on our nation!
Jacqueline Thomsen Courts Reporter National Law Journal
Jacqueline Thomsen reports for the National Law Journal:
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Even with an emoluments lawsuit filed against Trump on his first day in office, four years later nothing came of it. After he left office, the lawsuits were declared moot by the U.S. Supreme Court and dismissed.
The struggle to legally hold Trump to account over the alleged emoluments violations were emblematic of the rest of the lawsuits he faced during his presidency, whether they targeted him individually or his administration.
When lower courts ruled against Trump officials—as they did in suits over border wall construction—his administration would go to the U.S. Supreme Court to get an emergency order that allowed them to continue the challenged action. More often than not, Trump got a ruling in his favor.
“Trump could count on them for anything,” Norm Ornstein, a conservative resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, said of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
“And certainly that’s the case with Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett,” he added, referring to the three justices Trump appointed to the court.
And the novel legal questions surrounding lawsuits against a sitting president were enough to significantly delay several other challenges against him. House cases dragged out as courts determined whether lawmakers had the ability to sue to enforce subpoenas against the administration, a legal issue that forced similar suits to halt for months.
Despite two impeachments, hundreds of lawsuits against his administration and other litigation targeting him and his businesses, Trump left office relatively legally unscathed. Armed with a litigious past and a grip on his political party, he successfully managed to use the country’s institutions to minimize the blowback and get his way.
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Those with NLJ access (everyone used to get 3 free articles/mo; now it’s down to one) can read the rest of Jacqueline’s article at the link. She’s a great writer. Too bad so much of her work is “hidden behind the wall.”
Lack of accountability for scofflaw behavior, abuse of power, and corruption are hallmarks of third-world dictatorships and authoritarian regimes throughout history.
The Supremes’ enabling started with the Travel Ban cases and continued to the Capitol insurrection, which “the complicit ones” were able to watch unfold from their marble palace across the street.
So, the Supremes, the institution whose most important job is to protect American democracy, democratic institutions, due process, and individual rights when the other two branches fail, wasn’t up to the job! Despite the Supremes’ best efforts to undermine democratic governance, and their active furthering of the GOP’s race-driven voter suppression agenda, 81 million voters bailed us out this time around. But, it’s highly unlikely that American democracy could survive another “Trump-type” authoritarian regime. Don’t expect any help from the Supremes as currently comprised.
The Republican Party’s biggest problem is that too many people of color are exercising their right to vote. The party’s solution is a massive push for voter suppression that would make old-time Jim Crow segregationists proud.
The Conservative Political Action Conference circus last week in Orlando showed how bankrupt the GOP is — at least when it comes to ideas, principles and integrity. Some might argue that the party, in buying into the lie that last year’s election was somehow stolen, is simply delusional. I disagree. I think Republican leaders know exactly what they’re doing.
The GOP may have lost the White House and the Senate, but it remains strong in most state capitols. So far this year, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, Republicans in 33 states “have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 bills to restrict voting access.” The thrust of virtually all these measures is to make it more difficult for African Americans and other minorities to vote.
These efforts at disenfranchisement are more numerous, and more discriminatory, in several of the swing states President Biden carried narrowly: Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia. That should come as no surprise. GOP officials who had the temerity to follow the law and count the November vote honestly, such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, have been all but excommunicated by their state Republican Party organizations.
In Georgia — where not only did Donald Trump lose to Biden by 11,779 votes, but also two incumbent GOP senators were defeated by Democratic challengers — Republicans are using their control of the statehouse to try to eliminate all early voting on Sundays. That would put an end to “Souls to the Polls,” a popular Sunday get-out-the-vote initiative in which Black churches help parishioners get to polling places and cast their ballots.
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Read Eugene’s full op-ed at the link.
After a Presidential election that they lost by a substantial majority of votes, the GOP has decided that the solution isn’t to improve on their party’s unpopular messages of shame, blame, intolerance, ignorance, and White privilege. Nor have they chosen to abandon their corrupt and divisive leader. No, the answer, according to the GOP, is to reduce the size of the electorate to keep the will of the majority from prevailing.
There is not a whit of evidence about widespread voter fraud or any credible reason to believe that the results don’t represent the will of the majority of American voters. Nevertheless, the GOP has introduced slews of bills at the state level to make it more difficult for African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities to vote. Just like the White southern aristocracy after the Civil War, the modern GOP fears that true democratic majority rule will deprive them of their minority power and privilege.
James “Jim” Crow Symbol of American Racism
Well, you’ve heard it all before on Courtside. The Voting Rights Act is the cornerstone of modern American democracy. The forces of anti-democracy, including the GOP and their Supremes’ majority, intend to undo it in the name of White Supremacy.
The overt suppression of African-American voting rights that ended Reconstruction ushered in more than four decades of gross violations of the 13th 14th, and 15th Amendments. We should remember that the White-dominated Federal Government and the Federal Courts basically took a cowardly pass on the rights of our African American fellow citizens for generations.
Eric Lutz summed it up in his recent article on Vanity Fair:
Biden is reluctant to end that filibuster. But at a certain point, failing to do so means failing to reckon with the the severity of the threat to democracy—and the particular peril the GOP’s attacks pose to the rights of Black Americans and other minorities. “The argument that preserving the filibuster is necessary because it’s an important tool in our Democracy falls apart when it’s clearer with every passing day that we won’t have a Democracy without Congress passing voting rights legislation,” the former Obama aide David Plouffe remarked Monday. Republicans are mounting a concerted, relentless attack on democracy. To defend against it, Democrats’ response must be proportional. And that means confronting the reality that Trump leaving office didn’t extinguish his Big Lie, but made it more powerful.
It’s essential that the majority of us unite against the attempt of the corrupt GOP to restore the horrors of White Supremacy and Jim Crow. And, make no mistake — the attack on asylum seekers and migrants of color is an integral part of the White Nationalist program to kneecap American democracy. Under Trump, that effort culminated in the Capitol insurrection.
As the death of civil rights icon Vernon Jordon this week reminds us, those of us who believe in democracy must unite to fight the right and protect the right of all Americans to vote and the rights of immigrants to be treated as “persons” under the law.
Quick: You’re a lawyer and your client is on trial for inciting a violent insurrection. The problem is, he’s guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. Literally, there is no question whatsoever that he did what he’s been accused of—none! Whatsoever! And everyone knows it! To wonder if he’s guilty is to look at O.J. Simpson and think, “Well, the glove doesn’t fit, so who knows?” Nevertheless, you’ve been hired to defend him—after basically everyone else in your profession refused—and defend him you will! But how? If you’re Donald Trump’s attorneys, the answer is clearly: Lie, lie, play some Madonna clips, and lie some more.
There were far, far too many lies told over the course of Bruce Castor Jr., David Schoen, and Michael van der Veen’s presentation to catalog them all. In fact, it would be easier to simply point out the rare moments in which they did tell the truth. But, just for posterity’s sake, here were some of the biggest whoppers the defense team told as it claimed that Trump wasn’t responsible for the rally that took place at the Capitol on January 6:
Trump never intended for “the joint session [of Congress] be prevented from conducting its business”: This is obviously completely false and the reason we know that is because Trump repeatedly tried to get Mike Pence to stop Congress from doing just that, reportedly telling the V.P., “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.”
The rioters were mostly antifa, and one of the first people arrested was a member of the left-wing group: This, like virtually all of Trump’s lawyers’ claims are not true. The first person arrested was John E. Sullivan, who has denied being a member of antifa, and the FBI has said there is zero evidence that the supporters’ movements participated in the riot, no matter what Trump’s most shameless loyalists say. (Rep. Matt Gaetz, for instance, falsely claimed, “They were masquerading as Trump supporters and, in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.”)
A prior protest in front of the White House was just as bad: Referring to the June protest in front of the White House, van der Veen claimed “violent rioters” attacked officers and “at one point, pierced a security wall, culminating in the clearing of Lafayette Square.” (1) There was no breach; (2) five people didn’t die (3) the people who were hurt were the protesters tear-gassed so that Trump could do a photo shoot with a bible outside a church (an event that, surprisingly, did not result in him bursting into flames).
“The reality is Mr. Trump not in any way shape or form instructing these people to fight or use physical violence. What he was instructing them to do was to challenge their opponents in primary elections, to push for sweeping election reforms, to hold Big Tech responsible—all customary and legal ways to petition your government for redress of grievances which of course is also protected Constitutional speech.” Right, right, sure, sure. Trump totally wasn’t encouraging his supporters to air their grievances via violence, he just wanted them to push for election reforms. He just wanted them to form political action committees, you see! Run for office! Fight ideological differences at the ballot box! It’s actually extremely impressive van der Ween was able to get through this whole thing without bursting into laughter, and for that he should win some kind of award (and then lose his license to practice law).
“There was no insurrection”: There was! We all saw it! If you missed it, just google “Capitol riot” or “Capitol attack” or “Trump insurrection.”
In addition to the many lies told by Trump’s defense, his legal team also proffered a series of arguments for why he couldn’t possibly be found guilty that sound like something a bunch of stoned college kids came up with shortly before a mock trial they forgot to prepare for, which is actually an insult to stoned college kids unprepared for mock trials. Specifically, we’re talking about the series of clips the defense presented showing various Democrats using the word “fight,“ which they claim means Trump can’t also be held responsible for telling his supporters to “fight,“ because other people have said “fight” before and they weren’t found guilty of inciting insurrections. (Naturally, they left out the part about how, for instance, when Elizabeth Warren told supporters to “fight” they didn’t proceed to storm the Capitol and try to burn down democracy):
Or that, when Chuck Schumer said “fight” he was talking about fighting COVID-19. Yes, this a real thing that actually happened:
And yes, there was also this:
Of course, the bald-faced lies and complete lack of convincing arguments will clearly do little to sway the majority of Republicans, who have already decided how they’re going to vote, which we know because they‘ve already said as much and also because during the question-and-answer portion of the day, a typical question posed of the attorneys went something like, “Can you tell us how it’s possible that President Trump has not been named People’s Sexiest Man Alive yet? Is it because the media is in the can for liberals? Because we can’t think of another explanation!”
Anyway, Madonna, eh? Someone better impeach that menace, ASAP!
Just in case there was any question re: whether or not Trump loved the insurrection he personally set into motion…
CNN reports that the ex-president insisted the rioters were patriots in a call with House leader Kevin McCarthy:
In an expletive-laced phone call with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy while the Capitol was under attack, then President Donald Trump said the rioters cared more about the election results than McCarthy did. “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Trump said, according to lawmakers who were briefed on the call afterward by McCarthy.
McCarthy insisted that the rioters were Trump’s supporters and begged Trump to call them off. Trump’s comment set off what Republican lawmakers familiar with the call described as a shouting match between the two men. A furious McCarthy told the president the rioters were breaking into his office through the windows, and asked Trump, “Who the f–k do you think you are talking to?” according to a Republican lawmaker familiar with the call.
“I think it speaks to the former president’s mindset,” Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, an Ohio Republican who voted to impeach Trump last month, told CNN. “He was not sorry to see his unyieldingly loyal vice president or the Congress under attack by the mob he inspired. In fact, it seems he was happy about it or at the least enjoyed the scenes that were horrifying to most Americans across the country.”
In reality, as others have observed, the “defense team” could have read old copies of the Congressional Record or all the baseball scores from the 2019 season from the podium and it wouldn’t have made any difference to corrupt GOP Sens who had already decided to acquit notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence of guilt.
The indifference and boredom with the suffering of others and the clear misdeeds of Trump exhibited by scumbags like Cruz (who actually helped prepare the inept “defense”), Hawley, Cotton, et al, was pretty telling. Obviously, they wouldn’t have cared a fig if Trump’s rioters had done in Pence, Romney, or any other of their “colleagues.”
It’s all about the next election and destroying American democracy.
My favorite part is when the Trump defense Team kept whining about the rights of 74 million who voted for the The Big Clown. It’s like their attempt to disenfranchise and diss the 81+ million of us who didn’t vote for Putin’s Puppet are irrelevant? But, that’s always been the way the “modern GOP” has “governed.”
Right now, the GOP is hard at work at the state level trying to disenfranchise as many Black and Brown voters as possible in advance of the 2022 elections.
Remember all the great “bipartisanship” and concern with the legislative process on the tax giveaway (nobody actually read it, clearly not Trump) or the unsuccessful attempt to “do in” Obamacare. Lots of great “bipartisanship” on display with the Coney Barrett confirmation and the confirmation of a steady stream of Federalist Society judges.
The current GOP is an ongoing threat to the national security and well-being of our nation.
John Reeves reviews Ty Seidule’s“Robert E. Lee & Me” in WashPost:
January 1872, Jubal Early, a former Confederate corps commander, delivered an address at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., to honor Robert E. Lee, who had recently died. Believing that Lee was one of the finest military leaders in history, Early declared, “Our beloved Chief stands, like some lofty column which rears its head among the highest, in grandeur, simple, pure and sublime, needing no borrowed lustre; and he is all our own.” In subsequent years, Early and several elite ex-officers would deify Lee while creating the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War. According to that view, the war wasn’t about slavery but rather states’ rights. And the North won only because of its superior resources. An additional tenet is that Lee was the greatest soldier in the war on either side.
At the same time the Lee myth was being created, former rebels began reinforcing white supremacy all across the South. In Walton County, a rural community in Georgia, the Ku Klux Klan terrorized freedmen after the war. In 1871, Jake Daniels, an African American blacksmith from the county, was killed by 20 disguised men after refusing to repair a buggy for a White man, who still owed him money from previous jobs. The Klansmen showed up at Daniels’s door in the middle of the night. Daniels went outside but quickly recognized the danger. He tried to reenter his house but was shot in the back of the head. The men then shot him five or six more times before leaving the scene.
This type of violence was not uncommon in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Georgia alone, 589 people were lynched between 1877 and 1950. As Ty Seidule writes in his powerful new book, “Robert E. Lee and Me,” “If Lee and Confederate worship created one side of the white supremacy coin, violent terror to enforce racial domination provided the other side.”
Seidule tells the story of his transformation from a believer in the Lost Cause to a critic. Growing up in Virginia and Georgia, he worshiped Lee. It was only later, as the head of the history department at the U.S. Military Academy, that he discovered the truth about Confederate myths. Seidule writes: “I grew up with a lie, a series of lies. Now, as a historian and a retired U.S. Army officer, I must do my best to tell the truth about the Civil War, and the best way to do that is to show my own dangerous history.”
Seidule has written a vital account of the destructiveness of the Lost Cause ideology throughout American history. He shows how films, textbooks and memorials promoted white supremacy by glorifying traitors and enslavers like Lee and other Confederate leaders. Perhaps the best attribute of this fine book is the author’s honesty. When talking of his personal metamorphosis, he vows to “quit hiding behind the impartial, know-it-all historian and open up about the southerner, the boy who grew up on Lee idolatry, and the man who wrapped his identity around the heroes of the Confederacy. Be honest. Be vulnerable. Above all, tell the truth.”
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Read the rest of the review at the link.
It’s never too late for the truth.
Lots of White folks still have the audacity to be upset and offended because “their” factionalized account of U.S. history — one that even those of us who grew up in the North were fed to a large extent — is (finally and incrementally) being replaced with a more accurate accounting of the truth, unhappy as facing it sometimes can be.
“Their” myths and false narratives are more important than the many African-American lives and futures snuffed out by racism. Shows that BLM has it right — the myths and fabricated visions of the past so integral to the White self-esteem of many are more important than the lives and futures of African-Americans snuffed out by institutionalized racism, much of it perpetrated by our Government and our legal system.
A frank accounting of our past, the good, the bad, and the ugly, is a necessary step to our moving forward as a nation.
Trump’s lie that the election was stolen has cost $519 million (and counting) as taxpayers fund enhanced security, legal fees, property repairs and more
President Donald Trump’s onslaught of falsehoods about the November election misled millions of Americans, undermined faith in the electoral system, sparked a deadly riot — and has now left taxpayers with a large, and growing, bill.
The total so far: $519 million.
The costs have mounted daily as government agencies at all levels have been forced to devote public funds to respond to actions taken by Trump and his supporters, according to a Washington Post review of local, state and federal spending records, as well as interviews with government officials. The expenditures include legal fees prompted by dozens of fruitless lawsuits, enhanced security in response to death threats against poll workers, and costly repairs needed after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. That attack triggered the expensive massing of thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington amid fears of additional extremist violence.
Although more than $480 million of the total is attributable to the military’s estimated expenses for the troop deployment through mid-March, the financial impact of the president’s refusal to concede the election is probably much higher than what has been documented thus far, and the true costs may never be known.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
Bad government doesn’t come cheap! The absurdity of the biggest liar, grifter, fraudster in American Presidential history falsely claiming fraud — and having cowardly dishonest pols like Cruz, Hawley, and McCarthy fan the flames — isn’t lost on the majority of us outside of “magamoron world.”
And remember, the “GOP — Party Of Insurrection, Lies, Conspiracy Theories, Bad Government, & Irresponsibility — still refuses to stand up to this vile traitor and his magamoron supporters!
Supremes Sign Death Warrants For Vulnerable Refugees, Trash Refugee Act of 1980Dumping Asylum Seekers in Honduras Artist: Monte Wolverton Reproduced under license“Justice” Star Chamber Style
This is part of What We Learned, a series of reflections on the meaning and legacy of the Trump years.
One of the last things the Trump administration did, while it still had the power to do it, was reportedly kidnap a 9-year-old boy from his family. Customs and Border Protection officials at San Francisco International Airport denied entry to 19-year-old Christian Laporte and his younger brother, Vladimir Fardin, traveling from Haiti on U.S.-issued student and tourist visas respectively last Sunday—and then separated them from each other, declared Vladimir to therefore be an unaccompanied minor, and shipped him off to a detention center.
This was, by this point in Donald Trump’s term, not particularly surprising. Child abuse was at the center of the country’s immigration policy for these past four years, part of an intentional effort to scare people away from trying to come here. Hundreds of children disappeared into custody with no effort to keep track of them or reunite them with their families. A regime that had already been inhumane under President Obama, pushing migrants toward deadly desert crossings, turned fully malignant, with federal agents destroying water supplies and prosecutors targeting humanitarian workers. Asylum laws were cast aside.
On one level, this was straightforwardly racist, joining the goals of white nationalist policymakers like Stephen Miller to the daily bigotry of many border patrol officers. Rhetorically and conceptually, though, it was an effort to roll back the consensus that the United States is a nation of immigrants. The attack extended to legally documented immigration and residency, and on to citizenship itself, breaking precedent to strip people of what had seemed like a secure membership in the nation.
As Adam Serwer indelibly wrote, the cruelty of this was the point. The politics of Trumpism were built around white people sharing in rituals of viciousness and exclusion, coming together to follow their leader’s rejection of their designated enemies and to revel in how far things would go.
But the longer the administration wore on, the more the cruelty seemed to have another, horrifyingly practical point behind it. Trumpism was not just testing how hateful the country could be. It was exploring the limits of America’s capacity for indifference.
By the end, there were no limits to be found. The people thrown into detention at the border or deported at random may have been the first to be treated as nonpersons, but they soon had more company than anyone could count. Hurricane Maria hit U.S. territory in Puerto Rico, and the administration simply failed to respond, leaving hundreds and then thousands of people to die. It was Katrina all over again, except it wasn’t: No real lasting blame attached itself to the government’s deadly failure. The death toll rarely made it to the top of any lists of the president’s wrongdoing.
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Read the rest of the article t the link.
Readers of Courtside over the past few years know all about this: “Dred Scottification” — dehumanization of “the other” — often the most vulnerable among us.
It’s the the basic policy of large numbers of GOP politicos, many Federal Judges (including, disgracefully, GOP-appointed Supremes who routinely hide their inhumanity behind wooden, wrong-headed legalisms and complete gobbledygook designed to screen them from the stench of decaying humanity they have betrayed), lots of bureaucrats, and about 74 million American voters who voted to retain a cruel, incompetent, neo-Nazi and his regime based on 30,500 outrageous lies and false narratives, most of them overtly racist, misogynist, bigoted, dehumanizing, or all all of the foregoing.
These are NOT “differences of opinion” or “conservative v liberal philosophy.” Not by any means! They are differences in humanity: how we value truth, justice, and the essence of our fellow humans’ right to exist.
The good news is that there were at least seven million more of those of us willing to give humanity a shot. But, coming to an “equilibrium” in a democracy where nearly half the voting population rejects the basic principles of democracy and indeed the humanity of much of our majority and most of the world beyond us, won’t be easy.
As the Migration Policy Institute has shown, the Trump-era changes to the immigration system numbered in the hundreds and consisted of dramatic reinterpretations of the laws alongside seemingly clerical changes, such as revised application forms for visas, higher fees and tighter deadlines in immigration courts — all to advance a maximalist enforcement agenda and slow down the ordinary gears of immigrant admissions. High-level White House advisers, working with knowledgeable allies in the Homeland Security and Justice departments, pushed out regulation after regulation to render asylum laws more restrictive and make it harder for noncitizens to present their case in immigration courts. Trump’s attorneys general exerted unprecedented authority to define asylum laws to severely limit claims by victims of domestic and gang violence, and to constrain immigration judges’ ability to grant relief and manage their dockets in a way that provides a semblance of due process.
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And yet, the new administration’s policy agenda will not be complete unless legislative proposals are accompanied by concerted executive action across the administrative state, and not just because ambitious legislation on any issue faces an uphill climb in a Senate with the narrowest of Democratic majorities. Even when it comes to pass, legislation emerges from a bargain, leaving issues unaddressed, introducing new concepts to be interpreted and creating new programs that demand administration. Changing the direction of our government requires not only executive vision, but also multilayered strategies that make their way through the bureaucracy and down to the ground — along with the stamina and patience to see them through.
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THE BATTLE FOR DUE PROCESS @ JUSTICE ISN’T OVER: Flailing, Failing Department Needs A Bureaucratic House-Cleaning, Now!
By Paul Wickham Schmidt
Courtside Exclusive
Jan. 24, 2021
Read Cristina’s complete article at the link. The book that she and Adam Cox wrote The President and Immigration Law along with that of my friend and colleague Professor PhilSchrag, Baby Jails, should be required reading for all incoming Biden-Harris officials.
A “democracy” that doesn’t understand how it came to run prisons for vulnerable kids and star chambers for legal asylum seekers, and how to end them immediately, can expect little success in achieving social justice, promoting economic equality and prosperity for all, or leading and advocating for democracy abroad.
It all starts with immigration. I can draw a straight line from the Muslim Ban, to the Roberts’ Court’s disgraceful and cowardly abdication of responsibility to stop it in its tracks (grotesquely undermining the many lower court Federal Judges who had courageously “mapped it out for them”), to GOP politicos running around undermining our free and fair elections, to “magamorons” and other traitor/crazies storming the Capitol. Folks “get” the abdication of moral responsibility and legal accountability when it is delivered by those who should be standing up for democracy.
The failure of career civil servants at all levels to “just say no” and rebel against these outrageous failures of Constitutional governance and simple human decency, combined with a horribly deficient Supremes’ majority that abandoned both legal legitimacy and moral leadership, created a beyond dangerous pattern that came very close to toppling two centuries of the “democratic experiment” and still has the future of our democratic republic “on the ropes.”
Just look at what happened at the DOJ in the final weeks of the regime! Government officials who knew better settled for “heading off” a President’s treasonous acts rather than exposing them to the public, the Vice President, and leaders of Congress (perhaps other than treacherous co-conspirator Kevin McCarthy) who could have taken action for the immediate removal of this “clear and present threat” to our national security from the office for which he was so completely unqualified. Who knows, they might even have stopped the insurrection!
Look at the failed and ethically vapid Solicitor General’s Office (once, but no longer, one of the “Jewels in the Crown” of Government) that time and time again moved forward to defend unethical and unconstitutional policies before a willing Supremes’ majority based on patently false narratives and obvious pretexts (not very convincingly) concealing the overt racist, White Nationalist agenda of Trump, Miller, and the other neo-Nazis who had seized control of large portions of our governing machinery. Who, with the disgraceful complicity of the Supremes, turned American asylum law from the life-saving humanitarian refuge it was intended to be to instead an ugly weapon of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, child abuse, death, torture, unjust imprisonment, and overall dehumanization of the most vulnerable among us! What’s wrong with this picture? Everything!
Checks and balances and the courage and integrity of a professional career civil service are supposed to halt abuses like this, even in the face of failure of one of our two major political parties and our highest Court to act with integrity and adhere to democratic norms! But, with a few exceptions, courageous folks like U.S. Immigration Judge Ashley Tabaddor, Col. Alexander Vindman, and others like them, it did not happen over the past four years. That nearly cost us our country! (Note that Tabaddor, Vindmin, and others like them were punished, with the disgraceful treasonists from the GOP looking on and actually cheerleading, for speaking out and upholding their oaths of office.)
Buried in the carnage of the departed regime are the many lives unnecessarily lost, futures ruined, and lasting trauma — trauma that will continue to adversely affect our nation far into the future — caused by failure to stop the kakistocracy’s unconstitutional, cruel, and inhuman abuses. From intentionally inept COVID policies, to “politicizing” masks, to deaths in detention, to unlawful deportations to torture, to unfair, clearly political misapplications of the death penalty (basically “legalized murder”), to officially-sanctioned misogyny — this damage can’t be swept away overnight.
Like legislative and judicial failures, bureaucratic failure comes at a cost — a huge one! The fact that it might be largely “out of sight, out of mind” to the arrogant, largely white, privileged, ruling elites and ivory tower “High Court” jurists doesn’t mean the harm isn’t real. Just that our society has enabled some in power to look away and avoid meaningful contact with the human wreckage and lasting pain and damage they have caused and or tolerated!
Already, we can see how the Biden-Harris Administration’s inexplicable failure to “take charge” at a broken DOJ is undermining the long-overdue and well-thought-out progressive immigration agenda they announced with such fanfare. Here’s what’s come to light in just the past few days at the broken and dysfunctional DOJ:
Seeking the illegal deportation to Haiti of a mentally ill individual denied due process by the EOIR kakistocracy;
Failure to repudiate scurrilous, misogynist attacks on well-known refugee woman “Ms. A-B-“ by unqualified then “acting” AG Jeffrey Rosen;
Issuance by the “EOIR Clown Show” of more false narratives and anti-migrant “precedents” — basically delivering the “big, public middle finger” to the new Administration and the AG-designate;
Release of a blockbuster investigative report on misogyny and misconduct within the Immigration Judiciary — with no response or plan for corrective action from the DOJ;
Appointment of a bunch of bureaucratic nobodies to “caretaker” duties at the DOJ — including one quickly found by reporters — but apparently missed by the incoming Administration — to have had ties to the grotesque child abuse program run by White Nationalist former AG “Gonzo” Sessions;
Release by the IG of a report showing the role of Sessions, Rosenstein, and other DOJ officials in “official child abuse” – without any promise of accountability for past or future misconduct;
A treasonous plot by the President, a GOP Congressman, and a corrupt DOJ political hack that, although thwarted, went unreported until uncovered by reporters from The NY Times!
To state the obvious, why weren’t folks with known integrity, courage, and ability — professional decision-makers with track records of upholding our Constitution — like Judge Ashley Tabaddor and her colleagues in the leadership of the National Association of Immigration Judges — put in charge of the DOJ debacle to “ride herd”on this mess, restore some integrity, and prevent any more damage until “Team Garland” arrives? Few folks at Justice know as much about the “inept DOJ bureaucracy and failure of justice at Justice” than the NAIJ leadership which has been “at war” with the kakistocracy for years!
The solutions are still out there. But, it will take boldness, courage, and some “quick thinking outside the box” by “Team Garland” to get this completely (and unnecessarily) unacceptable situation under control!
That begins with an immediate clean-up of the “immigration kakistocracy/bureaucracy” throughout Justice — starting with the “EOIR Clown Shown.” Bring in the immigration/human rights/due process experts and let them start fixing the problems!
Stop defending the unprofessional garbage being aimlessly tossed into the Federal Courts by the EOIR White Nationalist deportation factory still running under orders from Miller and Hamilton. Have all these cases reviewed by experts in immigration/human rights/due process and racial justice!
Fire anyone in the SG’s office who presents bogus arguments concerning fake “immigration emergencies” and illegally promulgated “regulations” to the Supremes. End the unethical practice of using one-sided “precedents” to develop anti-immigrant “litigating positions” for OIL.
Stop appointing unqualified individuals to precious Immigration Judgeships. Remove the entire BIA and replace it with real expert appellate judges unswervingly committed to fundamental fairness and due process for all. Replace “worst practices” with “best practices.” Stop the “Aimless Docket Reshuffling” at EOIR. Cut the largely self-created Immigration Court “backlog.”
Bring in Professor Rodriguez, Professor Schrag, Professor Ingrid Eagly, Judge Dana Marks (who argued and won the landmark Cardoza-Fonseca case before the Supremes), Judge (and former BIA Judge and high-ranking DOJ official) Noel Brennan, Judge Amiena Khan, Judge Mimi Tsankov, Marielena Hincapie (NCIJ), Dean Kevin Johnson (UC Davis Law), and a “due process brain trust” of others like them! Let them start “kicking some tail,” fixing the problems, and restoring sanity, humanity, and due process to the broken immigration kakistocracy at DOJ. Now, before any more lives are lost or futures irrevocably ruined!
Let “practical scholars” like Rodriguez, Schrag, Eagly, and Johnson “turn their research and great thoughts into action.” “A little less talk, and a lot more action,” as Toby Keith would say!
The NDPA has already shown that it can out-litigate and out-strategize the Government immigration kakistocracy. In many ways, only the abject failure of the Supremes’ majority to stand up for the Constitution, rule of law, and human decency has prevented the NDPA from completely annihilating the kakistocracy, wiping out all of its misdeeds by judicial decree, and perhaps even holding criminals like Miller and Wolf accountable for their “crimes against humanity.”
Judge Garland is a smart person. The “smart thing” would be to get the “NDPA on the inside at Justice,” creating order from chaos and re-establishing justice @ Justice now!
Otherwise, smart or not, he’s likely to spend the bulk of his tenure as a “caption” on the never-ending avalanche of new legal actions filed against the deadly immigration bureaucracy by the NDPA. Because, I promise that the fight for due process in immigration and human rights isn’t over! It has just begun!
There is lots to be gained by working together to solve these problems. But if it takes litigation, continuing conflict, and a never-ending political and press crusade against an Administration I otherwise support to get the job done, so be it!
The battle isn’t over until the kakistocracy is removed, at every level, and due process, fundamental fairness, equal justice, and respect for human dignity — all both Constitutional and human rights — become a reality for all persons in America (including those physically present at our borders) rather than just the cruel, unfulfilled promises they have been to date.
Due Process Can’t And Won’t Wait! Due Process Forever!
PWS
01-24-22
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GO PACK GO!
Green Bay PackersAaron Rodgers Quarterback Green Bay PackersDevante Adams Wide Receiver Green Bay Packers
Pennsylvania Lawmaker Played Key Role in Trump’s Plot to Oust Acting Attorney General
The congressman’s involvement underlined how far the former president was willing to go to overturn the election, and Democratic lawmakers are beginning to call for investigations into those efforts.
Representative Scott Perry first made President Donald J. Trump aware that a relatively obscure Justice Department official was sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s view that the election had been stolen.
WASHINGTON — When Representative Scott Perry joined his colleagues in a monthslong campaign to undermine the results of the presidential election, promoting “Stop the Steal” events and supporting an attempt to overturn millions of legally cast votes, he often took a back seat to higher-profile loyalists in President Donald J. Trump’s orbit.
But Mr. Perry, an outspoken Pennsylvania Republican, played a significant role in the crisis that played out at the top of the Justice Department this month, when Mr. Trump considered firing the acting attorney general and backed down only after top department officials threatened to resign en masse.
It was Mr. Perry, a member of the hard-line Freedom Caucus, who first made Mr. Trump aware that a relatively obscure Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, the acting chief of the civil division, was sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s view that the election had been stolen, according to former administration officials who spoke with Mr. Clark and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Perry introduced the president to Mr. Clark, whose openness to conspiracy theories about election fraud presented Mr. Trump with a welcome change from the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who stood by the results of the election and had repeatedly resisted the president’s efforts to undo them.
Mr. Perry’s previously unreported role, and the quiet discussions between Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark that followed, underlined how much the former president was willing to use the government to subvert the election, turning to more junior and relatively unknown figures for help as ranking Republicans and cabinet members rebuffed him.
It is unclear when Mr. Perry, who represents the Harrisburg area, met Mr. Clark, a Philadelphia native, or how well they knew each another before the introduction to Mr. Trump. Former Trump administration officials said that it was only in late December that Mr. Clark told Mr. Rosen about the introduction brokered by Mr. Perry, who was among the scores of people feeding Mr. Trump false hope that he had won the election.
But it is highly unlikely that Mr. Trump would have known Mr. Clark otherwise. Department officials were startled to learn that the president had called Mr. Clark directly on multiple occasions and that the two had met in person without alerting Mr. Rosen, those officials said. Justice Department policy stipulates that the president initially communicates with the attorney general or the deputy attorney general on all matters, and then a lower-level official if authorized.
As the date for Congress to affirm Mr. Biden’s victory neared, Mr. Perry and Mr. Clark discussed a plan to have the Justice Department send a letter to Georgia state lawmakers informing them of an investigation into voter fraud that could invalidate the state’s Electoral College results. Former officials who were briefed on the plan said that the department’s dozens of voter fraud investigations nationwide had not turned up enough instances of fraud to alter the outcome of the election.
Mr. Perry and Mr. Clark also discussed the plan with Mr. Trump, setting off a chain of events that nearly led to the ouster of Mr. Rosen, who had refused to send the letter.
After The New York Times disclosed the details of the scheme on Friday, the political fallout was swift. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the incoming chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told the Justice Department in a letter on Saturday that he would investigate efforts by Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark to use the agency “to further Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.”
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Uh, seems like criminal schemes to interfere with free and fair elections, manufacture false claims, pressure Government officials tofalsely endorse clearly baseless claims, file bogus suits before Supremes are acts of treason, even if eventually thwarted!
“The beginnings of a Congressional investigation by Dems” seems like a totally inadequate response! These are crimes, and all who participated, particularly Trump,Perry, and Clark belong behind bars. Action should also be taken against the officials who stopped them, but failed to disclose the plot to those who might have taken immediate action to remove the unhinged, patently unqualified to serve Traitor/President.
🇺🇸Due Process Forever! Treason & Insurrection, Never! No “Bogus Unity” With Insurrectionists!
