Among the decisions handed down by the Supreme Court this past week was one that will gut labor rights. One that will gut voting rights. But also one that includes an instruction manual on removing rights altogether.
The Supreme Court decision approving Trump’s Muslim ban in its third incarnation was a notable decision not because the Court was fooled by the pretense that Trump’s ban was not religious discrimination. What makes the decision so staggering, so frightful, is that admits that this is a pretense. The decision is made in full awareness of Trump’s remarks about Muslims. It acknowledges Trump’s statements about creating a ban explicitly for that purpose. It even acknowledges that the outcome of the ban will be primarily to limit the ability of Muslims to travel to the United States.
But the decision includes language explaining that since the purpose of banning Muslims is not actually written into the text of the order … it’s okay. Neither intent nor effect is considered. Only the plain words of the text. It's a version of literalism that begs for obfuscation. One that invites the authors of bills and orders to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, and gender ... so long as they can do so without mentioning the group they’re legislating against. It’s not a decision that challenges legislators to try and fool the court. It’s a decision that says they don’t even have to try. Even bills and orders written with a clear discriminatory purpose are okay, Because textural literalism is, as the Court is now deploying the term, is a promise that neither reason nor merit will be used in future decisions.
Leonard Pitts lists just a few of the examples of Trump’s statements listed in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s vigorous dissent.
“[A]t a rally in South Carolina, Trump told an apocryphal story about United States General John J. Pershing killing a large group of Muslim insurgents in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood in the early 1900s.”
“In March 2016, he expressed his belief that “Islam hates us. … [W]e can’t allow people coming into this country who have this hatred of the United States … [a]nd of people that are not Muslim.’
[Trump] called for surveillance of mosques in the United States, blaming terrorist attacks on Muslims’ lack of ‘assimilation’ and their commitment to ‘sharia law.’ ”
All those statements and many, many more were known to the Court. Acknowledge by the Court. The discriminatory nature of Trump’s statements was not in question. Neither was the discriminatory purpose of his executive order.
You’ll seldom find a more compelling example of that willful blindness than this. To approve the travel ban, after all, the Court had to take Trump at his word that it was based in national-security concerns and had nothing to do with his animus toward Muslims. And the Court did. It put aside overwhelming evidence of religious bigotry. It even put aside the fact that Rudy Giuliani says Trump told him he wanted to ban Muslims and was seeking “the right way to do it legally.”
Even without Mitch McConnell standing by to put Judge Judy on the Court, the invitation that Chief Justice Roberts made with this decision is sure to have the court flooded with bills that meet this new test: Discriminate. Brag about it on television all you want. Just don’t put it in the bill. It’s a test that doesn’t just invite chaos, it welcomes tyranny.
Journalism and the Capital Gazette shooting
This is not Carl Hiaasen’s column. It’s something much sadder.
Among the five people murdered in the Gazette newsroom was Rob Hiaasen, 59, beloved brother of Herald columnist and best-selling author Carl Hiaasen. Rob grew up with his brother in Fort Lauderdale. A veteran of the Palm Beach Post, Rob had worked at the Gazette since 2010, when he was hired as the newspaper’s assistant editor. He, too was a columnist.
I’m very fond of Carl Hiaasen’s writing. I’d go to him much more often for APR, except that on many Sundays he is writing about issues local to South Florida. I have to confess, that I wasn’t aware of his brother. But, from what people have had to say about him in the last few days, I really wish that I had been. From Laura Lippman at the New York Times …
There are so many ironies about the shooting in Annapolis and the lives of five talented, dedicated people — people who loved their jobs and the community they served — cut short. But the irony that sticks with me is that Rob would be the perfect person to write about the suspect. And he would do it with abundant empathy and curiosity. He never condescended in his copy.
Carl Hiaasen is, understandably, off this week.
Tom Marquardt has a suggestion for a memorial to those who died.
Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara and Wendi Winters were journalists who survived layoffs, newspaper ownership changes, declining readership and even a denigrating president who called the work of people such as them “fake news.” But none of them, nor Rebecca Smith, a 34-year-old sales associate who had joined the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis last fall, could survive the barrel of a gun. …
Hiaasen was the 59-year-old father of three with a writing style never absent of humor or grace. McNamara was a 56-year-old rabid sports reporter who took on additional assignments just to stay employed in a profession he loved. Winters was a 65-year-old mother of four who relished the opportunity to cover community news and who baked cakes every Christmas for her colleagues. Four journalists dedicated to their mission regardless of obstacle or complaint. ...
President Trump isn’t responsible for the Annapolis tragedy any more than the Second Amendment is. But he and his supporters seem to have forgotten that the Constitution that gives them the right to bear arms is the same document that safeguards the right to free speech. You cannot honor one amendment without honoring the other 26. Those dedicated Capital Gazette journalists, like others before them and surely others after them, fought for free speech at all costs, including death. It’s not prayers their survivors and co-workers need; it’s respect for what reporters and editors do every day.
I would say it differently: Donald Trump holds some responsibility for those shootings. And so does the Second Amendment. And even more responsibility belongs with those who have purposely found in the Second Amendment an excuse to celebrate their fetish for violence.
Supreme Court
Heather Cox Richardson on the combined effect of the Court’s latest rulings.
Since the 1930s, when then president Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to break the hold of moneyed men on the government and broker “a new deal for the American people”, a cabal of reactionaries resolved to destroy the new government Democrats created. Roosevelt’s New Deal regulated business, protected social welfare and promoted national infrastructure on the principle that the role of government was not simply to protect the property of the wealthy, but rather was to promote equality of opportunity for all. The popularity of both Roosevelt and his agenda showed that Americans recognized that the government must rein in the runaway capitalism that had brought the nation to its knees.
Recognized is the correct tense. Because Americans now have been fed decades of millionaire CEOs who are doing a great thing for workers by “giving them a job.” They’re not employers who need employees. They’re “job creators” doing something only an exalted few can do.
Republicans rejected Taft as their standard-bearer in 1952, turning instead to Dwight Eisenhower, who launched the “Middle Way”, his version of the New Deal. The Middle Way included the largest public works project in American history: the Interstate Highway system, which updated American roads for a driving generation with leisure time on their hands, but expanded the federal government’s purview.
But Eisenhower’s policies extended some opportunities to people of color, and race gave the Taft Republicans a wedge to begin razing the activist state. Equality of opportunity for African Americans could only be achieved through the use of state power, and that would cost tax dollars. Equal rights, Taft Republicans insisted, simply redistributed wealth from hardworking white taxpayers to undeserving people of color.
In the sixty years since America has been bathed in the idea that equal rights is an unreasonable demand, and that people should really ask for "equal opportunity," which is defined in a number of ways. None of them having the first thing to do with equality.
This is a good article with some history behind the Republican position and why the ruling that was handed down this week was over sixty years in the making.
David Von Drehle on why Mitch McConnell cannot stop drooling.
For years, billboards demanding “Impeach Earl Warren” had dotted the byways of the South and Midwest, put there by conservatives outraged by the court’s landmark decisions regarding civil rights, voting rights, religion, free speech, sexual liberation, protections for accused criminals and more.
… conservatives maintained their focus and, in the process, they transformed the selection of justices from a haphazard art to a polished science. This science has changed — probably forever — the character of the Supreme Court.
With the retirement of Kennedy, announced on Wednesday, conservatives stand at the brink of claiming their prize. President Trump intends to swap the idiosyncratic Kennedy for a solidly reliable conservative justice. The resulting five-vote majority of rock-ribbed conservatives will surely dominate the court with a philosophical unity unseen in the United States since Warren’s long-ago heyday.
For myself, at 58, I have to realize that the court will never again in my life reflect a progressive or even a moderate stance. Unless something truly extraordinary happens—court packing, mass resignation, genuine impeachments—the court will hold not just a conservative, but an extremist position that permits racism and sexism, while promoting corporatism, for a period of decades.
Von Drehle explains that while presidents in the past selected judges based on recommendations and records, Republicans now have the Federalist Society, co-founded by Antonin Scalia, which acts to select and groom judges to rigorous conservative purity. Unless Trump really does select someone who he likes on television—Jeanine Pirro, Sean Hannity, Colonel Sanders—there’ s no chance he will select someone who is less of an ideologue than Scalia and every chance he will select someone worse.
Dana Milbank and the coming explosion.
Eight years ago, when Congress was about to pass Obamacare, John A. Boehner, leader of a powerless Republican congressional minority, gave a passionate, prescient speech on the House floor. “This is the People’s House, and the moment a majority forgets this, it starts writing itself a ticket to minority status,” he said….
We see Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowing to ram through the Senate the confirmation of the decisive fifth hard-right justice on the Supreme Court, quite likely signaling the end of legal abortion in much of the United States and possibly same-sex marriage and other rights Americans embrace, in far greater number, than they ever did Obamacare.
One wants to cry out: Hell no, you can’t! But Republicans can. They have the votes. Democrats can and should fight, but the GOP controls the schedule, sets the rules and already eliminated the procedures that gave the minority a say in Supreme Court confirmations.
If anything, the fury should be far more intense on the Democratic side right now than it was for Boehner in 2010. The Affordable Care Act was the signature proposal of a president elected with a large popular mandate, it had the support of a plurality of the public, and it was passed by a party that had large majorities in both chambers of Congress and had attempted to solicit the participation of the minority.
Now we have a Supreme Court nomination — the second in as many years — from an unpopular president who lost the popular vote by 2.8 million. The nominee will be forced through by also-unpopular Senate Republicans, who, like House Republicans, did not win a majority of the vote in 2016.
Republicans are a minority party. But they hold not just the majority of power. They have it all. And the power they deploy to secure this Supreme Court seat is likely to pay benefits, long-term, and short-term, that are incalculable.
The Left
Ross Barkan on the new face of the Democratic Party.
It is fitting that the earthquake victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over one of the most powerful Democrats in the country came sandwiched between two catastrophic US supreme court decisions. The court, shifting rightward with Donald Trump’s Neil Gorsuch, defended a travel ban on people from Muslim-majority nations and chose to devastate labor unions with its decision on Wednesday.
Many voters, particularly young people, understand the time for incrementalism and moderation is long over, and ended for good when a race-baiter who empowers white supremacists and oligarchs stormed into the White House.
It ended with the kids in cages, the attacks on immigrants and all people of color. …
In retrospect, Crowley as a future speaker was a laughable proposition. Ocasio-Cortez represents the future of the Democratic party. When she breezes to victory over token Republican opposition in November, she will be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She is a Latina in a majority minority district that Crowley, who is white and raises his family in Virginia, never truly represented.
I’ll take another 434 like Ocasio-Cortez, please. And while that may seem unlikely, we can certainly get a lot closer with exciting young candidates on the ballot who take clear progressive positions.
The Right
Cas Mudde on the party where one man gets all the votes.
After explaining that the vast majority of Americans do not support Trump, and that he was elected with almost 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton – because the United States is the only “democratic” country in the world where a person with fewer votes can win the presidency – I bring them the really bad news: if things continue this way, Trump will be comfortably re-elected in 2020.
Of course, the main reason for Trump’s re-election, as well as his election, is the dysfunctional political practice and system of the United States. Like in other western democracies, the white majority is overrepresented because minorities vote at much lower levels. However, unlike in most other democracies, various types of old and new acts of voter suppression actively discourage the electoral participation of non-white minorities. On top of that, gerrymandering further strengthens the disproportionate power of the white electorate, particularly in the conservative rural areas of the individual states and the country as a whole.
And the Supreme Court didn’t just okay a way to suppress the vote this week through gerrymandering, and approve purges of voter rolls the week before, it invited Republicans to come after voters any way they like.
Mudde provides a very good list of the reasons why Trump is favored by near-record numbers among Republicans. It’s hard to take, but worth reading.
Economy
Sam Pizzigati has wage idea that Republicans will hate a lot more than a $15 minimum.
Most of our mainstream political discourse on “fighting inequality” has revolved – for years now – around the more narrow goal of eliminating extreme poverty. Few of our elected leaders ever dare suggest that maybe we ought to think about eliminating extreme wealth as well. Even the mere idea seems a laughing matter.
Congressman Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat, knows all this from personal experience. Earlier this year, in a talk to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Ellison suggested that the time has come to start contemplating the notion of a “maximum wage”. …
America’s rightwing media promptly swung into mockery mode. “You won’t believe what the progressives want to do next,” the Weekly Standard mocked above a story that described Ellison’s maximum wage comments as “jaw-dropping”.
I believe it. I support it. I’d start with a cap on salary and benefits for anyone working at a public company. Then move on to a very high level of inheritance tax on estates over $1 million. Say … 100 percent. Which, like a maximum income, is also an old idea.
In 1880, Felix Adler, the philosopher who would later lead America’s first national campaign against child labor, proposed a 100% tax rate on income above the point “when a certain high and abundant sum has been reached, amply sufficient for all the comforts and true refinements of life”. …
Progressive lawmakers in Congress would later pick up Adler’s proposal. They had a big ally in Franklin D Roosevelt. In 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, FDR asked Congress for a 100% top tax rate that would leave no individuals with more than $25,000 of annual income – about $375,000 today – after taxes.
Want to understand how far from “extreme” the Democratic Party is now? Look back at that proposal. This is another good history lesson, well worth reading. And what happened with FDR’s radical proposal?
By 1944, America’s richest faced a 94% tax rate on income over $200,000. Our top tax rate hovered around 90% for the next two decades, a span of time that saw the United States give birth to the world’s first mass middle class.
The Washington Post on Trump’s ‘alternative economic universe.’
For a few wondrous hours on Friday, Americans were transported to an alternative reality in which the federal deficit is “coming down rapidly,” in part thanks to the massive tax cuts enacted by the Republican Congress and signed into law by President Trump last December. Our guide on this magical mystery tour was Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, who claimed on Fox Business News that the tax cuts were generating huge new economic growth and “throwing off enormous amount of new tax revenues,” with the result that “the deficit . . . is coming down. And it’s coming down rapidly.” Alas, the dream ended when Kudlow clarified to The Post on Friday afternoon that he was stating expectations about future deficits. “The economy is so strong right now it’s going to produce lower deficits. I probably should have said future deficits,” Kudlow said.
The real surprise here isn’t that Kudlow said it. Its that he felt obligated to even make a stab at moderating his statement. After all, Trump tells bigger whoppers before breakfast. Literally.
The fact is that the estimated $1.2 trillion reduction in federal revenues over the next 10 years that the Republican-majority Congress enacted six months ago has widened what was already a large hole in federal finances. The cash hemorrhage has already begun. …
According to the CBO, the federal deficit at the end of fiscal 2018 will be 78 percent of gross domestic product, roughly double its postwar average.
We could just write a bill that says Donald Trump, Larry Kudlow, and Steve Mnuchin pay 100 percent of their money. It should be relatively simple to write a piece of legislation that accomplishes that without using names. Birthdays? Addresses? Whatever, it’s bound to pass the test of the current court.
Trump–Russia
Randall Eliason wonders what Republicans in the House are hiding.
It’s time for the country to hear from FBI agent Peter Strzok. ...
The president and his supporters argue that Strzok’s early involvement in the Russia probe taints the entire investigation. On Thursday Trump tweeted that Strzok “was given poor marks on yesterday’s closed-door testimony” and that Strzok’s role in the Russia investigation was further evidence of the “witch hunt” against him. But although the president himself had called for Strzok’s testimony to be public, Congress did not agree.
It’s clear that Strzok said something, or some things, that Republicans do not want the public to hear. During the hearing with Rod Rosenstein and Christopher Wray, Democrat after Democrat called for the release of Strzok’s testimony. Republican after Republican refused to say a word about the issue.
Strzok certainly doesn’t act like someone with anything to hide. He offered to testify publicly and without a subpoena. He didn’t take the Fifth or demand immunity. Unlike the president in his dealings with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Strzok did not haggle for months over the terms or scope of an interview. Nevertheless, Congress first threatened to subpoena him unnecessarily and then chose to keep his testimony under wraps.
Ludicrously, Republicans at the same hearing snapped at Rosenstein and demanded more document than the 880,000 pages he has already turned over. While at the same time, Republicans are sitting on the testimony of Strzok … testimony that clearly destroys their conspiracy theories, or they wouldn’t be sitting on it. If you’re calling your Congressperson about any issue this week, remember to nudge them about releasing the testimony of Peter Strzok.
Russia–Trump
Max Boot on where Trump is taking the country at his annual employee review.
It is entirely fitting that the Trump-Putin summit will occur in Helsinki. Plucky Finland, which had fought the Red Army to a draw in 1940, thereafter accepted a quasi-vassal role. It remained a free-market democracy, but it entered into a “treaty of friendship” with the Soviet Union, compromising its principles and even its sovereignty so as not to provoke the bear next door.
President Trump, for reasons we can only guess at, seems bent on the Finlandization of Europe — and even the United States. It is an unlikely development because, whereas Finland was much weaker than Russia, the United States is much stronger. Yet Trump — who was elected with Russian help and continues to question the consensus judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia interfered in the election — appears determined to subordinate U.S. foreign policy to the Kremlin’s imperatives.
I have two guesses: The money Trump already owes Russia, and the money he expects to get for handing over the keys.
Trump and Putin will meet in Finland to divide not just Europe, but the United States. And Trump has already proven his worth at tearing things apart on both sides of the Atlantic.
Immigration
Note: This is one of those weeks where the essays were all written before the feet hit the bricks, so there are no columns on the powerful speeches, moving voices of children, and determined marchers who appeared on Saturday. Sorry about that.
Alexandra Levy can identify the one group that benefits from Trump’s zero-tolerance policy.
The two largest private prison contractors in the United States, GEO Group and CoreCivic, house thousands of immigrant detainees across the country. These corporations now face allegations that they force immigrant detainees to perform unpaid labor inside their facilities.
Immigrants come to the United States looking for freedom and for work. They find the jobs, but not the freedom, or the pay.