The Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times writes—Thanks, Jeff Sessions, for suing California — you might be doing the state a favor:
Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions warned California on Wednesday that "there is no secession" from federal jurisdiction as he appeared before members of the California Peace Officers Assn. in Sacramento to announce a lawsuit against three so-called "sanctuary state" laws. To no one's surprise, his claims drew immediate rebukes from state officials. Gov. Jerry Brown's initial response after the suit was filed late Tuesday stands as one of the better jabs in this political fight: "At a time of unprecedented political turmoil, Jeff Sessions has come to California to further divide and polarize America. Jeff, these political stunts may be the norm in Washington, but they don't work here. SAD!!!" He followed it at a news conference with another shot at Sessions, a former U.S. senator: "A fellow from Alabama talking to us about secession?" Grab the popcorn; this could get interesting.
Oddly, we (sort of) welcome the Trump administration's legal challenge in hopes that it will clarify not just for state officials, but for the federal government where the lines of responsibility and culpability might lie. We suspect the courts will side with California on most if not all of the legal issues Session's lawsuit raises, and in the process could underscore the reality that California's menu of state and local laws limiting involvement with federal immigration enforcement do not offer anyone anything remotely like sanctuary.
Being sued over immigration by an attorney general who was once considered too racist to be selected as a federal judge ought to be a badge of honor.
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post writes—Is populism really the villain here?
The shambles left by last weekend’s Italian election, the chaotic dysfunction of American government under President Trump, and the attack on liberal democratic institutions in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and elsewhere — all of these are being blamed on the haunting specter of “populism.”
But is populism the villain here? Do we even agree on what the word means?
This is more than an abstract debate. How we respond to what most certainly is a crisis of liberal democracy depends a great deal on how we understand the reaction that’s aggravating it.
A purely negative verdict on populism is especially prevalent among elites. But I’d argue that while authoritarian forms of populism are dangerous and must be resisted, other forms can contribute to democracy’s well-being.
Further, too much focus on populism itself risks mistaking the symptom for the cause. Angry dissidence doesn’t arise by accident. It is typically a response to genuine failures and injustices. The best way to combat the populists’ excesses is to deal with the discontents to which they give voice.
Leonard Pitts Jr. at The Miami Herald writes—When it comes to honoring Martin Luther King, maybe Trump should skip it:
I am not looking forward to April 4.
In fact, I’ve been dreading it for months. April 4 is, of course, the 50th anniversary of the day Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis. As such, it is one of those days when a president is called upon for wise words of summation and honor.
Unfortunately, the president to whom that task now falls is Donald Trump.
The churning in my stomach at the remembrance of that fact is a visceral reminder of just how much President Obama spoiled us all. Particularly African Americans.
For eight years, through black folks’ milestones and tragedies, the one thing we could depend upon was that our joy and pain would be reflected back to us and communicated out from us with compassion, insight and eloquence. When we commemorated the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, President Obama reminded us how the sacrifices of ordinary people on an ordinary bridge venerated freedom and inspired the unfree around the world. When we mourned Rev. Clementa Pinckney and eight other people massacred in a church for the crime of being black, he reminded us how amazing is grace.
Nearly every time black people needed him to speak to our sorrows, history or aspirations, Barack Obama rose to the occasion. Now April 4 looms, and it occurs to me there is literally nothing Donald Trump can say that will be equal to the moment.
Alex Shepard at The New Republic writes—Everything Wrong With the Democrats, in One Bill:
Deregulating banks—or doing just about anything that suggests coziness with banks—has not exactly been a winning message in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. But ten years later, a bipartisan bank deregulation bill that partly unravels Dodd-Frank is moving through the Senate with the support of every Republican and 17 Democrats.
What started off as an effort to relieve pressure on community banks and credit unions has morphed into a gift to the biggest banks in the country. Quite simply, if the bill passes, banks will get richer. The legislation raises the threshold that triggers increased oversight from the Federal Reserve from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion, freeing more than a dozen banks from stricter rules. It also exempts more banks from the Volcker Rule, which curbs their ability to make speculative bets with their own money, and reduces the amount of capital they need to keep on hand.
In exchange, a financial crisis will become more likely.
Steven Greenhose at The New York Times writes—The West Virginia Teacher Strike Was Just the Start:
The statewide teachers’ strike in West Virginia — one of the biggest in the nation in years — could signal the beginning of a new trend: a revolt against austerity policies.
The nine-day walkout, which ended Tuesday, was highly unusual. Teachers don’t leave their classrooms unless they’re seriously fed up, and West Virginia’s teachers were mad as hell. Austerity policies have squeezed them more and more each year: They earned, on average, $45,622 in 2016, with West Virginia ranking 48th among the states in teacher salaries, according to the National Education Association. Only Oklahoma and Mississippi paid less, and Oklahoma teachers, encouraged by the West Virginia walkout, are also considering a strike. [...]
West Virginia’s teachers were like the proverbial frog in water that was slowly being brought to a boil. But this frog realized what was happening and jumped. Moreover, state officials added insult to financial injury. When teachers from a few counties held protests in early February, Governor Justice belittled them, calling them “dumb bunnies.” Then the state health plan told teachers that if they didn’t download and use a “wellness app,” Go365, to track their steps, they would be penalized $500 a year. [...]
Austerity in West Virginia looks different from other places that have responded to recessions with budget cuts. In Britain, lawmakers cut public services, but they also raised taxes. In West Virginia, Republicans have used their trifecta power — the party controls the governor’s mansion and both houses of the Legislature, as they do in 25 other states — to cut per-pupil school spending, and that came after the state approved $425 million in bipartisan tax cuts.
Mike Males, is senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, San Francisco. At Yes! Magazine he writes—The Big Reason Young People Don’t Debate Gun Control the Way Adults Do:
Gun control advocates are celebrating the thousands of teenagers demanding that gun massacres like the latest at Parkland, Florida’s, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School “Never Again” happen.
But does politics offer a remedy? Gun violence discussion among adults is already retreating once again into an easy consensus: the problem is just about “kids”—deranged young shooters, and protecting “children” terrified of gun-menaced schools. Quick remedies are emerging from the White House and other political leaders: just raise the age for firearms purchases, pack schools with more cops, arm the teachers, install more security hardware, and widen the net of intrusive “mental health” regimes targeting young misfits.
But America’s gun violence epidemic only can be reduced through effective, enforced legislative policies—or simply by fewer people shooting people. [...]
Today’s youth could be described as “post-sociology.” That is, as a generation, they no longer act like the popular stereotype and conventional social-science construct of the risk-taking, impulsive teenager. The Millennial/Gen Z signature move seems to be this: “solve” social problems not through political reform but by reducing those problems to irrelevancy.
Danielle Allen at The Washington Post writes— Ten questions for the Parkland kids
In the digital age, anyone can change in an instant from a private to a fully public person, from being a kid doing homework to a celebrity. Whereas child and teen actors have whole teams of people to help them think about their public persona, and how celebrity distorts one’s personal life, young civic agents who experience this phenomenon are infrequently prepared for it.
Out of concern about these dangers, my colleagues and I developed what we call a “Reflection and Action” framework. This is a set of 10 simple questions that we think can help young civic agents — and civic agents of any age, for that matter — prepare themselves to endure the rigors of civic work. (Our website provides further resources for helping people make use of these questions.)
1. Why does what I’m pursuing matter to me?
2. How much should I share?
3. How do I make it about more than myself?
4. Where do we start?
5. How can we make it easy and engaging for others to join in?
6. How do we get wisdom from crowds?
7. How do we handle the downside of crowds?
8. Are we pursuing voice or influence or both?
9. How do we get from voice to change?
10. How can we find allies?
The goal of these 10 questions is to help people become equitable, effective and self-protective civic agents. They take one through a process of personal reflection and guide planning for one’s civic engagement.
Jonathan Malesic at The New Republic writes—Please, Millennials, Don’t Destroy Us Just Yet:
There’s a common refrain on the American left right now: “The kids are alright.” The student activists who launched a gun control movement in the wake of the high school massacre in Parkland, Florida, have given hope to progressives that the future they desire may yet emerge from the dark age of Trump. Encouraged by the teens’ example, some on the left want to accelerate their political rise by lowering the voting age to 16 nationwide. Others have called for millennials to overthrow their likeminded but ossified elders. “My message, as an aging Gen X-er to millennials and those coming after them, is: Go get us. Take us down,” Tim Kreider wrote last week in a New York Times op-ed title “Go Ahead, Millennials, Destroy Us.” “I for one can’t wait till we’re gone. I just wish I could live to see the world without us.”
But it would be a mistake for Generation X and Baby Boomer progressives to sit back and assume that generational turnover, all on its own, will usher in the more just, less violent America they’ve long hoped for.
There’s no guarantee that young people will remain politically liberal—by today’s standards—as they age, though the evidence favors it. “On an individual level, of course, many people’s political views evolve over the course of their lives. But academic research indicates not only that generations have distinct political identities, but that most people’s basic outlooks and orientations are set fairly early on in life,” Drew DeSilver of the Pew Research Center wrote in 2014. “Americans who came of age during the Truman and Eisenhower admiJhnistrations, and are now in their 70s and 80s, have fairly consistently favored Republican candidates, while those who turned 18 under Bill Clinton and his two successors have almost always voted more Democratic than the nation as a whole.”
Millennials are undeniably more progressive than their elders: In 2016, 55 percent of them identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning. But their coming of age as voters—millennials between the ages of 22 and 37, says Pew—hasn’t led the country to embrace liberal policies across the board.
John Nichols at The Nation writes—Texas Progressive Laura Moser Is Beating Democratic Insiders:
The defining characteristic of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for too many years now has been its well-honed ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Drowning in conventional wisdom, disconnected from realities on the ground, and instinctively inclined to react to Republicans rather than to set its own agenda, the DCCC is such a bumbling enterprise that even the chairman of the Democratic National Committee recently distanced himself from its so-called “strategies.” [...]
There’s a good case to be made that the DCCC helped Moser, whose grassroots fund-raising spiked after the attack. She also earned a late-in-the-race endorsement from Our Revolution, the group formed by Bernie Sanders backers that had established a strong presence in Texas—and when the results came in, Texas populist Jim Hightower, an Our Revolution Board member, said: “The voters of Texas showed they are the only deciders in the race to represent them in Congress.”
That let-Texans-decide theme became a vital part of the Moser campaign’s final appeal to Houston-area Democrats.
Moser closed his campaign with a TV ad titled “Our Turn,” in which she looked straight into the camera and declared: “We have to fix our broken politics―and that starts by rejecting the system where Washington party bosses tell us who to choose.”
Tim Murphy at Mother Jones writes—The DCCC’s First Big Test of 2018 Blew Up in Its Face:
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee waded into the seven-way primary for Texas’ seventh congressional district last month with a specific goal in mind: delivering a knockout blow to Laura Moser, a freelance writer and Resistance activist with a large national following, who it feared would crater the party’s chances in the closely watched swing district.
But the DCCC’s attacks on Moser 10 days before the primary—a broadside so clumsy and transparent it drew criticism from DNC chair Tom Perez and members of Congress—didn’t work as intended. Moser raised $87,000 in the days after the DCCC nuclear barrage and basked in the free publicity during the homestretch of the campaign. And on Tuesday, she secured a spot in the May 22nd runoff against Lizzie Fletcher, a Houston lawyer backed by EMILY’s List who led the field in the first round of voting.
Now Democrats in the seventh district, a longtime Republican stronghold that swung harder to Hillary Clinton than any other district in the country in 2016, will be faced with an unusual choice: a progressive candidate denounced by the official campaign organ of the House Democratic caucus, or a more moderate candidate rejected by the AFL-CIO.
The DCCC’s attacks on Moser steered clear of policy, instead focusing on the candidate’s residency (she only recently moved back to her hometown from DC) and something she once wrote about not wanting to live in rural East Texas (which is not part of the district). But with another two-and-a-half months to go, the differences between the two candidates will likely sharpen.
Jane McAlevey at In These Times writes—The West Virginia Strike Points a Path Forward for the Labor Movement:
Yesterday, West Virginia’s educators produced an incredible lesson plan on power. The timing and outcome of their struggle is epic. Before and during their strike—an unprecedented statewide walkout that shuttered doors to every school in the state’s 55 counties—the national media was writing the obituary of public-service unions, a narrative driven by the oral arguments in the Supreme Court case Janus vs AFSCME. As Trump’s solicitor general bloviated bad things about government workers’ unions, it was day three in West Virginia’s unauthorized, illegal strike in a state that already has the trappings of the laws that the right wing hopes to nationalize in the Janus case (no worker has to pay dues, fair share or agency fees to his or her union).
The West Virginia strike points the way forward for the working class and serves as an urgent memo to the leaders of what’s left of today’s unions. As Adena Barnette, a striking teacher and president of the Jackson County Education Association, told In These Times: “We understand this was a do-or-die moment. If we didn’t do it, there might not be a tomorrow to fix it. If we didn’t do it, we would have failed our kids, our schools and our community.”
While some have opined about what makes the strike unique to West Virginia—focusing on the history of coal and steel-workers and their last-century unions—it behooves us to extract crucial lessons that apply to every state. Those lessons would likely make the same kind of victory well within the power of today’s unions and the broader progressive movement.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times writes—The Race-Based Mortgage Penalty:
As the Trump administration begins to gut federal enforcement of civil rights laws, minority communities that were targets for predatory home loans before the recession have become vulnerable yet again to mortgage discrimination. This time, many banks are simply writing off communities of color and denying them loans at all.
An alarming new study by the Center for Investigative Reporting’s online publication Reveal found that African-Americans and Latinos were far more likely to be denied conventional mortgages than whites even when income, loan size and other factors were taken into account. The study examined 31 million mortgage records and found disturbing evidence in 61 metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis and San Antonio. African-Americans faced their worst obstacles in the South — Mobile, Ala.; Greenville, N.C.; and Gainesville, Fla. — and Latinos in Iowa City.
Black applicants were disproportionately turned away, as compared to whites, in 48 metropolitan areas, Latinos in 25, Asian-Americans in nine and Native Americans in three areas. In Washington, D.C., the study found that all four groups were far more likely to be denied home loans than were whites.
In Philadelphia, whites received 10 times as many conventional mortgage loans as African-Americans during 2015 and 2016, even though the two groups reside in the city in roughly equal numbers.
Eric Levitz at New York magazine writes—Trump Bids Good-bye to Gary Cohn — and Empirical Reality:
The stock market is a terrible proxy for an economy’s well-being. Corporate America’s conventional wisdom is not the revealed truth of the market gods. Multinational corporations and the median American worker have very different interests — and the former’s support for “free trade” is no less fickle and contingent on narrow self-interest than the latter’s is: Apple may want to build its electronics from the cheapest possible commodities, but it will fight like hell to retain the protectionist patents that inflate its profit margins at the consumer’s expense.
All of which is to say: In some parallel universe, the news that the president has decided to disregard the stock market’s feedback, buck corporate America’s common sense on trade policy, and oust the White House’s most influential voice of Wall Street wisdom might be cause for celebration, not trepidation.
But in that universe, Donald Trump is not the president.
Joel Clement, is a science and policy consultant and former career executive with the U.S. Department of the Interior. At The Washington Monthly, he writes—The Interior Department Is Putting the Fossil Fuel Industry First and Americans Last:
As a senior career official in a federal agency, I always understood and accepted that every administration has the prerogative to pursue its own policies, even those I don’t agree with. Yes, elections have consequences.
But from what I saw at the Interior Department, we’re dealing with something completely different now. The administration is abdicating its own mission, spoiling some of America’s most precious natural treasures, and aggravating the biggest threat to our existence—climate change.
This cannot end well. Ryan Zinke has proven unwilling to accept the role of chief steward of our national legacy of lands and waters. Unless he steps up to the challenge, the risks to American health and safety will escalate, from the Arctic to Puerto Rico, and the lands and waters we leave to our children and grandchildren will be unrecognizable.
Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News writes—Could a tiny country some 6,782 miles away bring the end of Trump's presidency?
Then there’s the matter of the tiny kingdom of Qatar, a key U.S. ally — well, it was, anyway — in the Persian Gulf some 6,782 miles from Philadelphia, yet possibly at the heart of the Kushner-Trump woes. Last week, the Intercept reported that Jared’s ex-convict dad, Charles Kushner, met privately in April 2017 with Qatari finance minister Ali Sharif Al Emadi — one of two meetings he had with Qatari officials regarding the never-ending drama at 666 5th Avenue. No deal was reached, which is significant.
Why? Because within a matter of weeks, something happened involving Qatar and U.S. policy in the Middle East that made no apparent sense at the time. Remember, Qatar is a key American ally in the oil-rich region — so much so that 11,000 U.S. troops are currently based there in our largest military base in the Persian Gulf. It seems like we’d want to be on their good side. Instead, five key Arab nations — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (now accused of seeking leverage with Jared Kushner … remember?), Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen — moved sharply against Qatar in early June 2017, cutting off diplomatic ties with the tiny oil state and curbing travel. And President Trump stunned even some on his own foreign policy team by hailing those acts, even seeming to take credit.
Look, indeed! Top U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis, seemingly sought to reassure Qatar after the Twitter blast, and the New York Times reported that the president’s surprising stance “sowed confusion about America’s strategy and its intentions toward a key military partner.” Did the Kushner’s failed business dealings with Qatar weigh on Trump’s mind as he met with key Saudi and UAE officials last spring and urged actions at odds with longstanding U.S. policy? Or consider it in reverse: Would Team Trump be praising the diplomatic isolation of Qatar if that nation had just bailed out Jared and Charles Kushner days earlier?
Either way, the implications are stunning. This is the worst nightmare for those who feared Trump’s presidency and that his business connections would somehow get entangled with government actions and policy.