SCOTUS: What If The Worst Happens?

Pray RBG outlives McConnell and Trump

I often talk about how I went to the same high school as Bernie-- James Madison in Brooklyn. Bernie graduated in 1959, a couple of years before I started. And a few years before Bernie started, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a student there. I was just 2 years old when RBG graduated from Madison but somehow the school seems more worthwhile because she was a student there. (Carole King too.)

RBG, one of the most admired women in America, was born in 1933. She'll turn 88 next March 15th. Unless Mitch McConnell's and John Thune's and their Senate cronies' Satanic prayers are answered. CNN reported that the Senate Republicans are sitting around hoping they can fill another Supreme Court seat before they are swept out of power in November, even talking about confirming a neo-fascist between November, when they are defeated at the ballot box, and January when the new Senate is sworn in!

CNN's Ted Barrett and Manu Raju: "Senate Republican leaders, undeterred by the scathing criticism leveled against them for blocking President Barack Obama's election-year Supreme Court nominee in 2016, are signaling that they are prepared to confirm a nominee by President Donald Trump even if that vacancy occurred after this year's election. The push comes despite ample apprehension from influential Republicans that the GOP could pay a political price for treating a nominee under Trump differently than they did under Obama. It also comes as Democrats are increasingly worried about the fragile health of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the 87-year-old liberal jurist who recently made public a new bout with cancer, and the possibility of other retirements. 'We will,' said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the second-ranking Republican leader, when asked if the Senate would fill a vacancy, even during the lame-duck session after the presidential election. 'That would be part of this year. We would move on it.'" Thune is not up for reelection this year. But McConnell is... and so is Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham.

[T]he veteran Iowa Republican who chaired the Judiciary Committee in 2016 and helped block Judge Merrick Garland-- Obama's nominee -- by refusing to schedule election-year confirmation hearings, said he would not fill a fill a vacancy now for the same reason.

"My position is if I were chairman of the committee I couldn't move forward with it," Sen. Chuck Grassley told CNN.

The current Judiciary Committee chair, Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, has professed differing views about whether he would try to confirm a nominee during the last year of Trump's term.

Asked about his past opposition to moving a nominee in a presidential election year after the primary season, Graham said: "After Kavanaugh, I have a different view of judges," referencing the brutal 2018 confirmation process of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

"I'd like to fill a vacancy. But we'd have to see. I don't know how practical that would be," Graham told CNN Monday. "Let's see what the market would bear."

Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who's a member of the Judiciary Committee, said that if a vacancy were to occur, he would like to get a nominee confirmed before the court's term begins in October.

Hawley said he would be "shocked" if Trump didn't try to fill a vacancy despite GOP arguments in 2016 that voters should decide which president selects a nominee during an election year.

Hawley said the difference between then and now is that Obama couldn't run again but Trump is on the ballot trying to win a second term.

"I think we have a different set of circumstances. We have a President who is very actively running for reelection," Hawley said. "He's going to be on the ballot. People are going to be able to render a verdict on him like they couldn't on Obama. My guess is he would absolutely nominate somebody. I would be shocked if he didn't."

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who is running for reelection, told Iowa PBS last week she supports confirming a potential nominee this year, according to the Des Moines Register.

"(If) it is a lame-duck session, I would support going ahead with any hearings that we might have," she said. "And if it comes to an appointment prior to the end of the year, I would be supportive of that."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has repeatedly vowed to fill a vacancy this year and has said the difference between now and 2016 is that by the time Obama, a Democrat, nominated Garland to fill the vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, Republicans controlled the Senate. Right now, Republicans control both the White House and the Senate.

A vacancy could put some GOP senators in a tough spot. Asked if he supported filling a vacancy this year, Sen. Thom Tillis, a vulnerable Republican running for reelection in North Carolina, said, "I am praying for Justice Ginsburg's health. That's all I'm really focused on right now."

Asked about filling a vacancy caused by retirement, not death, he downplayed the likelihood that would happen.

"I don't think there are many indications that there are. Normally those moves are made back in June over the session. I don't see any real possibility that there will be one," Tillis said.

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee include-- besides Graham, Grassley, Ernst and Tillis-- John Cornyn (TX), Mike Lee (UT), Ted Cruz (TX), Ben Sasse (NE), Josh Hawley (MO), Mike Crapo (ID), John Kennedy (LA) and crackpot neo-fascist Marsha Blackburn (TN). Instead of plotting to replace RBG, maybe they should be considering why Trump has set a pack of extrajudicial facsist goons loose on Portland and is threatening to do the same thing in Chicago and Detroit.

Or, in the words of David Graham (at The Atlantic): America Gets an Interior Ministry. "For decades, conservative activists and leaders have warned that 'jackbooted thugs' from the federal government were going to come to take away Americans’ civil rights with no due process and no recourse. Now they’re here-- but they’re deployed by a staunchly right-wing president with strong conservative support. In Portland, Oregon, federal agents in military fatigues have for several days been patrolling the streets amid ongoing protests about police brutality. These forces, employed by the Department of Homeland Security, have snatched people off the streets of the city, refused to identify themselves, and detained people without charges. Ostensibly, they are present to protect federal buildings from protesters. In practice, they seem to be acting on a much wider mandate, either to suppress protests or (more cynically) to provoke confrontation on behalf of a flailing White House that sees it as electorally beneficial." What can citizens do? Vote to defeat every single politician who doesn't speak out forcefully against this, on every single ballot, in every single constituency.

How Does It Feel To Have Someone In The White House Working Against The Best Interests Of The Country And Its Citizens?

Can anyone deny that for Putin, the Russian investment in the election of Trump, is the gift that keeps on giving? In his NY Times column yesterday, Republican pundit David Brooks observed that "The Trump era has been all about dissolving moral norms and waging vicious attacks. This has been an era of culture war, class warfare and identity politics. It’s been an era in which call-out culture, reality TV melodrama and tribal grandstanding have overshadowed policymaking and the challenges of actually governing." As David Graham pointed out in his piece for The Atlantic Monday, The Worse Things Are, the Better They Are for Trump, the last moves by the satanic pig-fucker Putin put in the White House "suggest his goal is not to fix the system, but to exacerbate turmoil for political gain... Trump and Lenin share a strategic instinct. Lenin reportedly said, 'The worse, the better'-- meaning that conditions that were more miserable for the people were likely to help his political aims. Trump’s approach to immigration and health care, both in the past few days and throughout his presidency, evince a similar understanding of power."

A friend of mine, an independent who has never contributed politically except twice to Bernie, once in 2016 and once this year, always tells me that if Trump cleans up the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) problem, he'll be reelected. I've been telling him for over 2 years that Trump hasn't the tiniest interest in cleaning up the MS-13 problem, only of exacerbating it so he can use it to scare his low-IQ base.

Graham continued that last week Señor Trumpanzee announced plans to end assistance to the Northern Triangle countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, or as Fox & Friends put it, "3 Mexican countries." Señor T on Friday: "No money goes there anymore. We’re giving them tremendous aid. We stopped payment." That's about $450 million, including money to support law-enforcement efforts against gangs. "The actual cash is a minimal amount-- a little less than 8 percent of the $5.7 billion Trump demanded for his border wall when he shut down the government in December, and less than 2 percent of the $25 billion the administration estimates the wall would cost overall. The fact that the aid numbers are small doesn’t justify spending them per se, but there’s a strong consensus among Latin America experts that these cuts are counterproductive. It’s common to talk about push and pull factors in immigration. Pull factors are things that draw migrants to a new country: the promise of better work, for example. Push factors are those things that drive migrants to leave home: unstable politics, high crime, poor economies. Trump has worked to reduce one pull factor by trying to make it harder to get asylum, but he has limited options beyond that, because no president wants to make the economy worse in order to deter immigration (though Trump has been willing to risk hurting the economy to install protectionist tariffs). But Trump’s decision to cut aid to countries that are major sources of immigrants to the United States seems likely to only increase the push factors, driving more people to attempt the journey as conditions in their home countries stagnate or worsen."

Many of Trump’s decisions on border issues seem designed not to solve any problem. This includes Trump’s standing threat to close the border with Mexico; his decision to end DACA, a program that he has said achieves goals he favors; and most prominently, his decision to separate unauthorized immigrant families arriving at the border. None of these do anything to solve or reduce what Trump has called a crisis at the border. In fact, they are likely to only worsen the crisis. Separations, for example, became a costly and distracting circus, taking up already short space in detention centers and then necessitating a major effort to reunite families and restore the status quo ante when courts predictably rejected the policy.

Along similar lines, it’s more politically useful for Trump to be in a lengthy fight about building a border wall than it is to have actually built it. If and when the wall is built, it will become clear that it isn’t a panacea for immigration, but in the meantime, it’s a useful political wedge. The more migrants are coming toward the United States, the more Trump can warn of an “invasion” and inflame nativist fears that he thinks will help him win reelection. Trump isn’t really interested in solving immigration. A permanent crisis is more useful to him.

The same dynamic holds true on Obamacare. Last week, the White House told a federal appeals court that the Affordable Care Act should be thrown out entirely. Trump then announced that he was calling on Congress to produce a replacement for the law. The decision was reportedly made over the objections of Trump’s attorney general and secretary of health and human services, and it has received a chilly reception from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

When the GOP controlled Congress in 2017 and 2018, it tried at length to repeal Obamacare and failed, and there’s no chance a Democratic House will be amenable to rescinding or replacing the law. In the absence of legislative movement, Trump has worked to weaken the ACA throughout his presidency. He has cut back on outreach and advertisement, slashed subsidies, supported repeal of the individual mandate, and enabled so-called association health plans, which a judge struck down last week, calling them “clearly an end-run” around the law.

The cynicism of Trump’s latest move on the ACA runs deep. The administration still doesn’t have any plan for what it actually wants to do on health care. Meanwhile, Axios's Jonathan Swan reports that the president doesn’t expect to win in the courts: “Trump has privately said he thinks the lawsuit to strike down the Affordable Care Act will probably fail in the courts, according to two sources who discussed the matter with the president last week.” For Trump, it’s a political win-win. Either he gets Obamacare thrown out, or judges rule against him, giving him another chance to rail against the judicial system, delegitimizing it and further undermining the rule of law.

None of these steps would make any sense if Trump’s goal was to improve health care, just as cutting aid to the Northern Triangle would make no sense if the president wanted to reduce immigration. But increasing turmoil is the point, since the worse things are, the better things are. For Donald Trump, at least.

Babies in Cages by Nancy Ohanian

In the file of "purposely making things worse for political gain, let's also look at a development Betsy Woodruff reported on Tuesday for the Daily Beast: Homeland Security Disbands Domestic Terror Intelligence Unit. This is a win-win in Trumpworld: a wink and a nod to his neo-Nazi support base and a way to make a bad problem worse. What could be more Trumpian? "The Department of Homeland Security has disbanded a group of intelligence analysts who focused on domestic terrorism," reported Woodruff. "Numerous current and former DHS officials say they find the development concerning, as the threat of homegrown terrorism-- including white supremacist terrorism-- is growing. 'It’s especially problematic given the growth in right-wing extremism and domestic terrorism we are seeing in the U.S. and abroad,' one former intelligence official told the Daily Beast."

The group in question was a branch of analysts in DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A). They focused on the threat from homegrown violent extremists and domestic terrorists. The analysts there shared information with state and local law enforcement to help them protect their communities from these threats.

Then the Trump administration’s new I&A chief, David Glawe, began reorganizing the office, which is the DHS component that has a place in the Intelligence Community. Over the course of the reorganization, the branch of I&A focused on domestic terrorism got eighty-sixed and its analysts were reassigned to new positions. The change happened last year, and has not been previously reported.

“We’ve noticed I&A has significantly reduced their production on homegrown violent extremism and domestic terrorism while those remain among the most serious terrorism threats to the homeland,” said one DHS official.

Former officials pointed to a spate of domestic terror attacks in recent years as evidence that DHS erred by shuttering this branch. From the massacre that left 11 people dead at a Pittsburgh synagogue to a shooting targeting Republican members of Congress in June 2018 to bomb threats that a deranged Trump fan directed at prominent Democrats and CNN, violent attacks informed by homegrown hatred have left Americans increasingly terrorized.

...Nate Snyder, a former DHS official who focused on violent extremism, said the department’s move undercuts Trump administration claims that it takes domestic terror seriously.

“You hear the secretary and this administration say how domestic terrorism is a clear priority and how resources will be bolstered, but you can’t say that and then all of a sudden get rid of the unit that’s there to detect threats and share information with our first responders, law enforcement, and federal partners,” Snyder said. “You can’t have it both ways.”

All Aboard! by Nancy Ohanian