Yesterday I worried aloud that the Sessions/Miller/Trump immigration policy separating children from their parents at the border was a move in a longer game to get rid of Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller without making it obvious that was the goal. With the President's apparent policy reversal yesterday, that no longer seems the case. Josh Marshall has a new hypothesis taking into account yesterday's executive order:
And there you have it. DOJ confirms that the White House knows the President’s executive order is in fact illegal on its face. What it does is set a 20 day countdown until Trump blames a court for forcing him to separate more families again.
The Post agrees:
[I]t remained highly uncertain whether the president’s hastily drafted order to keep families together in federal custody while awaiting prosecution for illegal border crossings would withstand potential legal challenges. And senior administration officials said the order did not stipulate that the more than 2,300 children already separated from their parents would be immediately reunited with them.
At the same time, a senior Justice Department official told reporters that the administration had little legal recourse but to release the families after 20 days unless a judge grants an exemption to a 1997 court settlement and subsequent rulings limiting the detention of children.
Trump’s order “seeks to replace one form of child abuse with another,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “Instead of protecting traumatized children, the President has directed his Attorney General to pave the way for the long-term incarceration of families in prisonlike conditions.”
Remember, the immorality of the administration's immigration policies is a feature, not a bug.
I had a thought last night that disturbed me. It goes something like this:
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is being set up as the heel, so the President can fire him without it looking like a step in shutting down the Mueller probe.
Think about it. Sessions has doubled down on a monstrous policy decision that almost the entire Republican Congressional caucus wants to stop. He has become almost a comic-book villain now, taking responsibility for a policy that actually came directly from the White House. Even he has to see how unpopular the policy is, as Republicans in Congress certainly do because their jobs are on the line. Why would he persist?
So this gives Trump an opportunity to be the hero that fires Sessions, reverses the policy, and (oh, incidentally) installs a new Attorney General much more likely to fire Rod Rosenstein. That this policy came directly from the Oval Office, and that firing Sessions would be a complete reversal of everything Trump has said about it for weeks, really won't make a difference.
If this sounds like a pro-wrestling storyline, don't forget where Trump came from. He doesn't really care about policy; he cares about ratings. And this story has given his reality show tremendous ratings. Never mind that thousands of real children will never see their parents again. When has this administration cared about real consequences?
As the President frequently says, "we'll see what happens." If this is, in fact, the play, I expect it to happen in the next week, before Congress can pass a law that would set the President up for a veto fight with his own party.
McKay Coppins, who profiled Miller for The Atlantic last month, believes that the outrage over the immorality of the administration's immigration policy is exactly the point:
A seasoned conservative troll, Miller told me during our interview that he has often found value in generating what he calls “constructive controversy—with the purpose of enlightenment.” This belief traces back to the snowflake-melting and lib-triggering of his youth. As a conservative teen growing up in Santa Monica, he wrote op-eds comparing his liberal classmates to terrorists and musing that Osama bin Laden would fit in at his high school. In college, he coordinated an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” These efforts were not calibrated for persuasion; they were designed to agitate. And now that he’s in the White House, he is deploying similar tactics.
As public backlash has intensified in recent days against the new border policy, Trump administration officials have predictably struggled to formulate a coherent, unified defense. Amid all the bumbling recriminations and shifting talking points, one can sense in some of these officials a natural response to the situation developing at the border—if not shame, then at least chagrin.
But for Miller, it seems, all is going according to plan—another “constructive controversy” unfolding with great potential for enlightenment. His bet appears to be that voters will witness this showdown between Trump and his angry antagonists, and ultimately side with the president. It’s a theory that will be put to the test in November. In the meantime, the heartrending orchestra on the border will play on.
We may be stuck with this asshole for another 2½ years. But in just 140 days, we can send him and his boss a clear message.
To almost everyone's frustration, the Supreme Court rendered two unanimous decisions today in which they declined to rule on the constitutionality of two gerrymandering cases. This means both Wisconsin and Maryland will keep their district maps through the November election:
In the Wisconsin case, the court said that the challenges must be brought district by district, with voters in each proving that their rights had been violated. The challengers asked the court to consider the state map as a whole.
The Maryland case was still at a preliminary stage, and the court in an unsigned opinion said the lower court had not been wrong when it decided not to make the state redraw the maps in time for the 2018 election.
The justices sent the [Wisconsin] case back to a panel of three federal judges to see if the challengers could modify their suit to show they have plaintiffs in the individual districts.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the plaintiffs should be able to do so.
“Courts—and in particular this court—will again be called on to redress extreme partisan gerrymanders,” she wrote. “I am hopeful we will then step up to our responsibility to vindicate the Constitution against a contrary law.”
I totally understand why SCOTUS punted, because they really do not want to weigh in on such a politicized issue. But wow, given that a majority of Wisconsin voters are Democrats, it's obvious that the current Wisconsin map is a power-grab by Republicans who fear they're losing power against urban Democrats.
We're not going to be done with this in my lifetime.
The President has essentially admitted he lies constantly:
In short, the president is saying that it’s totally acceptable to lie to the press, and by extension the public, as long as he is not under oath in the justice system. (As I’ve reported, Trump is far more honest under oath.) As a matter of law, this is true, but as a matter of character and leadership, it is not. The president is freely telling the public that he has no compunctions about lying through his teeth. Why does anyone still debate whether he means it?
There were other dishonest statements peppered throughout his remarks. He said that the inspector general’s report found “total bias” in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails; in fact, it found the reverse, saying political bias did not affect decisions. He said that the report “totally exonerated” his statements; in fact, it rejected the entire thrust of his statements about Comey. Trump said that Comey acted criminally; the IG report does not say that. He said Mueller’s team has no Republicans; Mueller is a lifelong Republican who has served under GOP presidents as well as Democrats.
There’s a long list of these lies, both in what Trump said today and running back for months. It becomes tiresome to fact-check them, trying to prove that Trump is not telling the truth about them. But there’s no need to take reporters’ word for it: The president makes no secret that he thinks it’s OK to lie to the public. After all, he said so himself.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Jeff Sessions invoked the same Bible verse that previous generations of slave-owners invoked to justify forcibly separating children from their parents:
Romans 13 does indeed say to “submit to the authorities,” because they “are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.” But this is in the context of what comes before it (“share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality”) and after (“owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law”) – and, indeed, admonitions to care for the poor and the oppressed that come from Isaiah, Leviticus, Matthew and many more.
Evangelical leaders who looked the other way when Stormy Daniels and the “Access Hollywood” tape surfaced this time have denounced Trump’s recent “zero-tolerance” policy that, as the National Association of Evangelicals, the Southern Baptist Convention and others wrote to Trump this month, has the “effect of removing even small children from their parents.”
“God has established the family as the fundamental building block of society,” they wrote. The leaders urged Trump to end zero tolerance and use “discretion” as previous administrations did.
I guess we should all be happy they haven't come for us yet.
Andrew Sullivan says the President "is making us all live in his delusional reality show:"
The president believes what he wants to believe, creates a reality that fits his delusions, and then insists, with extraordinary energy and stamina, that his delusions are the truth. His psychological illness, moreover, is capable of outlasting anyone else’s mental health. Objective reality that contradicts his delusions is discounted as “fake news” propagated by “our country’s greatest enemy,” i.e., reporters. If someone behaved like this in my actual life, if someone kept insisting that the sea was red and the sky green, I’d assume they were a few sandwiches short of a picnic. It’s vital for us to remember this every day: Almost no one else in public life is so openly living in his own disturbed world.
This, in fact, is the poignant and quite bonkers script in Trump’s head: that the economy was in free-fall until he took office, after which it soared; that he alone has brought black and Hispanic unemployment down; that his administration has accomplished more than any other at this point in its term; that the Democrats colluded with the Kremlin to try to rig the election; that Robert Mueller is a closet Democrat; that climate change is a hoax; that the American-created international trading system was designed to hurt the U.S.; that you can borrow over a trillion dollars in a full employment economy with no consequences in inflation or debt; and that sabotaging the ACA will lead to lower premiums, greater choice, and better health outcomes for all. Each one of these assertions is what he wants to be true. And so they are true. As the chairwoman of the GOP just explained to any skeptics left in the formerly conservative party: “Anyone that does not embrace the Donald Trump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake.”
The bad news is that a vast chunk of the American public wants all this to be true as well.
Woe to thee, o land, when thy king is a child.
Stuff that landed in my inbox today:
Also, while we're on the subject of the C-word, I love Minnie Driver's response: "That was the wrong word for Samantha Bee to have used. But mostly because (to paraphrase the French) Ivanka has neither the warmth nor the depth."
The Washington Post reported today that it has cataloged 3,251 false or misleading claims that President Trump has made since taking office:
That’s an average of more than 6.5 claims a day.
When we first started this project for the president’s first 100 days, he averaged 4.9 claims a day. But the average number of claims per day keeps climbing as the president nears the 500-day mark of his presidency.
In the month of May, the president made about eight claims a day — including an astonishing 35 claims in his rally in Nashville on May 29.
Our interactive graphic, created with the help of Leslie Shapiro and Kaeti Hinck of The Washington Post’s graphics department, displays a running list of every false or misleading statement made by Trump. We also catalogued the president’s many flip-flops, since those earn Upside-Down Pinocchios if a politician shifts position on an issue without acknowledging that he or she did so.
Meanwhile, former CIA director John Brennan, writing in the same newspaper, compares Trump to the "corrupt, incompetent and narcissistic foreign officials who did whatever they thought was necessary to retain power" that he met and studied while working for the agency.
It's going to get worse before it gets better, you know. Especially between election day and January 3rd, when Congress has its lame-duck session. That's going to be epic.
I've had a lot of things going on at work the past couple of weeks, and not many free evenings, leading to these link round-up posts that add nothing to the conversation.
But there should be a conversation, and here are some topics:
- President Trump and Jeff Sessions have shifted US immigration enforcement policy such that cruel, unfair, and harmful treatment of immigrants is no longer an unintended consequence—it's now the point.
- Let's not forget that Dinesh D'Souza, who Trump just pardoned, didn't just mess up some campaign finance paperwork. No, this guy funneled tens of thousands through his mistress and his assistant. Trump's pardon seems to be all about rewarding his racist trolling.
- Sears will close another 100 stores in the next couple of months, continuing Eddie Lampert's slow strangulation of the company.
- Roseanne Barr's sacking from ABC could be a learning moment for the right, but it probably won't be.
- Meanwhile, bluish-purple Illinois yesterday became the 36th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed in 1977. If one more state ratifies it, then it could become law—though there is enough ambiguity in Article V of the U.S. Constitution to stop us counting chickens just yet.
Finally, on Monday Parker will have his final check-out by his surgeon, which should clear him to go back to day camp on Tuesday. The poor fuzzy dude has spent way too much time home alone since his injury. I'm looking forward to him getting back into his pack.
Not all of this is as depressing as yesterday's batch:
I'm sure there will be more later.