Probably for the first time since he announced his candidacy in 2015, Trump has found himself on The Elites side of the divide against The People. Instead of leveraging the power of conspiratorial thinking, for at least a moment, he is seeing it being used against him.
This week's featured post is: "Is Epstein what will finally break through?"
This week everybody was talking about Jeffrey Epstein
That's the subject of the featured post. After posting it, I noticed that Matt Stoller had a slightly different take on the same subject.
Trump could have done many things about the Epstein files. He’s a reality show genius, he knows how to keep the plot going. But he just said that the mystery to be revealed, the one driving the whole Trump show - yeah, that doesn’t exist. He chose to do the single worst thing for the MAGA movement, he tried to take away their ability to believe in a moral universe in which they were the heroic army fighting for truth and justice. He also chose to embarrass the podcasting and MAGA influencers who built their businesses on elaborate stories around Jeff Epstein and the Deep State. You can’t just tell them to stop. Too much money and too much belief is riding on it.
and birthright citizenship
In Trump v CASA, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration a win without ruling on the underlying issues of the case. CASA is a case challenging Trump's executive order eliminating birthright citizenship. The order is blatantly unconstitutional, since birthright citizenship is clearly stated in the 14th Amendment. If you want to eliminate birthright citizenship, you need to pass a new constitutional amendment repealing that part of the 14th amendment.
But the Trump administration didn't seek the Court's opinion on the core issue of the case, but only on the nationwide injunctions that judges had granted that stopped the Trump administration from taking any action on his executive order. And they won: The Court sharply restricted the circumstances under which a judge could issue a nationwide injunction. The immediate impact of the Court's decision was that the administration could begin denying the benefits of citizenship to people who were born in states that weren't part of the suit challenging the order.
So if you were born in Missouri to undocumented parents, the administration might refuse to issue you a passport. But it would have to issue one to your brother, who was born in Illinois.
This week, a lower court issued a ruling that avoided that kind of chaos. Slate summarizes:
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante blocked Donald Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship in a ruling that applies nationwide. Despite its scope, Laplante’s order is not the kind of “universal injunction” that the Supreme Court prohibited in June’s Trump v. CASA. Rather, the judge certified a class of plaintiffs that includes everyone who would be affected by Trump’s policy and issued an injunction to protect their fundamental rights. This class action seeks to fill the gap that the Supreme Court created when it limited judges’ power to halt unconstitutional executive actions last month.
Slate's Mark Stern and Dahlia Lithwick discuss the details.
and the trade war
So Trump announced his "liberation day" tariffs on April 2. Global markets crashed, and he backed off, putting a 90-delay on everything, so that countries could negotiate trade deals that got them lower rates.
Sadly, hardly any country did. And can you blame them? What deal can you strike with Donald Trump that he can be counted on to keep?
So the 90 days ran out last week. Since then, Trump has been announcing new tariff rates that go into effect August 1. The markets have barely reacted at all, possibly because they still believe the TACO theory: that Trump will chicken out before the rates actually go into effect.
but this is the best thing I read this week
USA Today columnist Rex Huppke used the Supreme Court's logic to reach a very different conclusion. In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the Court voted 6-3 along ideological lines to require a Maryland school district to let parents opt their kids out of lessons involving LGBTQ themes. The Court recognized that
parents have a right ‘to direct the religious upbringing of their children’ and that this right can be infringed by laws that pose ‘a very real threat of undermining’ the religious beliefs and practices that parents wish to instill in their children. ...
As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his opinion regarding the use of LGBTQ+ books in schools, some “Americans wish to present a different moral message to their children. And their ability to present that message is undermined when the exact opposite message is positively reinforced in the public school classroom at a very young age.”
Huppke wants to invoke this precedent to protect his own right to present a moral message to his children.
I have a deeply held religious conviction that, by divine precept, lying, bullying and paying $130,000 in hush money to an adult film star are all immoral acts.
He lists many other Trump behaviors that he does not want validated by public schools, and so:
Attempts to teach my children anything about Donald Trump, including the unfortunate fact that he is president of the United States, place an unconstitutional burden on my First Amendment right to freely exercise my religion. ... So any attempt to teach my children that Trump exists and is president might suggest such behavior is acceptable, and that would infringe on my right to raise my children under the moral tenets of my faith. (My faith, in this case, has a relatively simple core belief that being a complete jerk virtually all the time is bad.)
Huppke is obviously using humor here, but there is a serious point underneath: The reasoning that judges like Samuel Alito use in their rulings is intended to be applied only by certain people for certain purposes. Some people have a right to opt their children out of lessons that contradict their moral values, and some do not. Left-wing plaintiffs can't expect to get the same consideration from this Court that right-wing plaintiffs do.
and you also might be interested in ...
Another story of Trump administration lawlessness: The border patrol held an 18-year-old American citizen for 23 days. They would not allow him to shower or call his mother, who had the birth certificate proving he was born in Dallas. He lost 26 pounds during his ordeal.
Galicia, his brother and friends were on their way to a soccer scouting event at Ranger College when they were stopped by CBP. He was hoping to earn a scholarship. "We're supposed to graduate from high school next year, and we wanted to do something to secure our education," he said.
His brother was born in Mexico, so he signed self-deportation documents to get himself out of the inhumane conditions. Galicia told the Dallas Morning News: "It got to the point where I was ready to sign a deportation paper just to not be suffering there anymore. I just needed to get out of there."
CIA Director John Ratcliffe is performing for an audience of one: He's not trying to protect the United States from its foreign enemies, he's trying to make Donald Trump happy.
In this case, he is making statements about Russian interference in the 2016 election that are simply false, and that are not supported by the CIA report that he says supports them. The facts, which have been found again and again by investigations headed by members of either major party, are that Russia did try to interfere in the 2016 election and that it did so with the intention of helping Trump.
and let's close with something bookish
Tom Gauld is a cartoonist with a focus on libraries and books. Here, he presents a solution to a common problem. If it only it were that simple.
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