We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post and his analysis of Donald Trump’s shutdown and his cruel approach to the presidency:
Imagine going a month without a paycheck. Imagine lining up the bills and deciding which get paid and which don’t — mortgage or rent, electricity, heating. Imagine having to commute to work at an “essential” government job and trying to scrape together enough money for gas or bus fare. All of these hardships, and many more, are being inflicted on hardworking public servants for no earthly reason. From the beginning, Democrats have taken a reasonable position: Keep the government open, and let’s have a debate and a negotiation about border security. Trump agreed — until far-right pundits accused him of abandoning his border wall, which everyone knows will never be built. [...]
Meanwhile, we learned last week that the sadistic policy of separating would-be immigrants from their children has been far more extensive, and more shocking, than anyone suspected.[...]
Above all else, Trump is a bully. Like all schoolyard tyrants, he tries to project great strength to mask internal weakness. But remember the one universal truth about bullies: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
In an important piece, Elie Mystal at The Nation explains why Trump’s offer of a DACA “deal” to build his wall is just a scam:
Remember, DACA recipients were the first people that Trump tried to take hostage for his wall, and Democrats were willing to give Trump $25 billion to free them. But… his racist base didn’t like “amnesty” for children who were brought to this country through no fault of their own, and Trump turned down the deal. Instead, Trump decided to let the courts weigh in on his executive order to end DACA.
Since then, lower courts have ruled that DACA cannot be rescinded by executive fiat in the way Trump has tried. And on Friday, the Supreme Court did not agree to hear the Trump administration’s challenge to those lower court rulings. Friday was almost certainly the last day this term that the Supreme Court would agree to hear new cases. What that means, at a minimum, is that the lower-court rulings preserving DACA will remain in place for another year. Nobody needs Trump to agree to that. Trump’s offer to extend the thing that’s already been functionally extended is irrelevant.
Meanwhile, law professor Ilya Somin writes in USA Today about the ludicrous proposal of declaring a national emergency to find funds for an ineffective and expensive border wall:
The Supreme Court has long held that the use of eminent domain must be "expressly authorized” by law. No emergency laws “expressly” permit the use of eminent domain for border walls not otherwise authorized by Congress.
Building Trump’s wall requires using eminent domain on a massive scale. [...] The result would be one of the largest federal condemnations in modern American history. In Texas alone, there are almost 5,000 privately owned lots in the likely path of the wall. Securing the land and building on it is likely to be costly and time-consuming. Construction and legal battles over compensation can drag on for years.
This reality underscores the absurdity of claiming that a wall is needed to combat an “emergency.” Emergency powers are intended to address immediate threats that cannot be dealt with by slow-moving legislative processes. If the supposed emergency can be fixed by a wall that takes years to build, that means it was not an emergency in the first place. In reality, there is no genuine crisis that a wall could fix. It would not even meaningfully reduce undocumented immigration.
Michelle Goldberg at The New York Times takes a deep dive into hostile sexism and the need for a woman to be president:
Plenty of women understood intuitively that a misogynist backlash helped Trump win his Electoral College victory. It’s why they poured into the streets the day after he was inaugurated, and why they’ve led the Resistance ever since. It’s why there’s a record gender divide in voting patterns and a record number of Democratic women in the new Congress. And it’s why it’s both thrilling and slightly terrifying that the Democratic presidential field is going to have at least three strong, viable female contenders. [...]
America has never before seen a presidential primary in which this many women compete against one another. It could help to normalize female political ambition, allowing the candidates to be individuals rather than archetypes. Voters who are hungry for female leadership won’t be forced to rationalize away the flaws of a lone woman contender. Real progress is not just being able to vote for a woman, but being able to vote for the best woman.
At The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell explains how the GOP is now the pro-Russia party in its policies as well as its collusion:
Once upon a time, Ayn Rand-reading, red-baiting Republicans denounced Soviet Russia as an evil superpower intent on destroying the American way of life.
My, how things have changed.
The Grand Old Party has quietly become the pro-Russia party — and not only because the party’s standard-bearer seems peculiarly enamored of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Under Republican leadership, the United States is starting to look an awful lot like the failed Soviet system the party once stood unified against.
On a final note, don’t miss the latest editorial at The New York Times on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade:
[A]bortion rights supporters have spent too long on the defensive, while anti-abortion forces have put substantial pressure on all three branches of government. It isn’t too late to wipe outdated laws off the books and make the procedure more accessible to low-income women and more available to everyone. And it is certainly high time to make abortion rights a voting issue in elections.