Much protest is naive; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone's individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
This week's featured posts are "Your Sift-Archive Review for the Trump Era" and "White House, Inc.".
This week everybody was talking about the appeals court ruling
which went against the Trump administration and its prototype Muslim ban, which I discussed in detail last week. This was a 3-0 ruling that included agreement from Bush appointee Richard Clifton. The judges wrote a unified per curiam opinion rather than the usual practice of one judge writing a majority opinion with dissents and concurrences from the other judges. This seemed intended to emphasize that they were of one mind.
This was the state of play going in: Trump had signed an executive order; the states of Washington and Minnesota had sued; a federal judge in Seattle had issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) preventing the most odious parts of the order from taking effect until the his court could have a full hearing and make a definitive ruling. The administration then asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to set aside the TRO. That request is what got turned down Thursday, so the executive order continues to be blocked for the time being.
Despite the occasional flamboyant writer like the late Justice Scalia, judges tend to be circumspect in their language. They usually write in a stone-faced style, so if you catch an occasional frown sneaking into the prose, you can surmise that they're probably royally pissed off. The appellate court's 29-page ruling is full of frowns.
Charlie Savage's summary in the NYT is pretty concise and seems accurate. The biggest frown in the text is the judges' response to the Trump argument that his order is "unreviewable" by the courts.
There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy.
The most serious problem in the order was its treatment of legal permanent residents. The administration argued that the White House counsel had interpreted the order so that it no longer applied in these cases. The judges weren't inclined towards trust:
[I]n light of the government’s shifting interpretations of the executive order, we cannot say that the current interpretation by White House counsel, even if authoritative and binding, will persist past the immediate stage of these proceedings.
And finally, the judges seemed put off by the administration's arrogant assumption that its unreviewability argument would fly, so further support for its position was unnecessary.
Despite the district court’s and our own repeated invitations to explain the urgent need for the executive order to be placed immediately into effect, the government submitted no evidence to rebut the states’ argument
During questioning, Clifton sometimes seemed skeptical that the order was motivated by hostility against Muslims, or that it should be viewed as a watered-down version of the "Muslim ban" Trump campaigned on. The ruling made no judgment on that point, presumably to maintain unanimity.
The next stop is the Supreme Court, which still has only 8 justices. A 4-4 tie would leave the appellate court ruling in place.
Trump could easily improve his legal position by rescinding the order and re-issuing a more carefully constructed one. He's talking about doing that, but he is also never going to admit that the original order was a mistake. So it will be interesting to see how he squares that.
The ban gets all the headlines, but Trump is cracking down in a lot of other ways. The CBC reports this story about a Canadian citizen from a Montreal suburb, who was attempting to drive to Burlington, Vermont with two of her children and an adult cousin. They all had Canadian passports, but were turned back after a four-hour delay at the border. Her crime? She is a hijab-wearing Muslim born in Morocco (which is not one of the seven countries covered by the ban). The border patrol asked questions about her religion and attitudes towards President Trump and his policies. The two adults were required to surrender the passwords to their phones, and then denied entry when the phones contained videos of Arabic prayer services.
"I felt humiliated, treated as if I was less than nothing. It's as if I wasn't Canadian," Alaoui told CBC News in an interview Wednesday.
She now has to decide whether she wants to risk a similar experience over spring break, when she had planned to visit her parents in Chicago.
The L.A. Times reports that Trump's January 25 executive order "Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States" (which is really about deportation of undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom pose little or no threat to public safety) goes way beyond targeting the "bad hombres" he liked to talk about in his rallies.
Up to 8 million people in the country illegally could be considered priorities for deportation, according to calculations by the Los Angeles Times. They were based on interviews with experts who studied the order and two internal documents that signal immigration officials are taking an expansive view of Trump’s directive.
Far from targeting only “bad hombres,” as Trump has said repeatedly, his new order allows immigration agents to detain nearly anyone they come in contact with who has crossed the border illegally. People could be booked into custody for using food stamps or if their child receives free school lunches.
Anyone charged with a crime can be deported, without that charge ever seeing the inside of a courtroom. So local police can deport undocumented people just by arresting them on a bogus charge and notifying ICE. It's hard to believe that this kind of arbitrary power won't be abused.
and White House, Inc.
This note got so long that I broke it out into a separate post.
A nostalgic add-on for people my age and older: Remember how scandalous it was when Jimmy Carter's ne'er-do-well brother used his sudden notoriety as an unreconstructed good-ole-boy to launch Billy Beer?
Simpler times.
and the silencing/spotlighting of Elizabeth Warren
In the Senate debate over Jeff Sessions' nomination to be Attorney General -- he was approved -- Majority Leader Mitch McConnell invoked the little-used Rule 19 against Elizabeth Warren. On a party-line vote, the Senate determined that Warren was improperly impugning the character of a fellow senator (which Sessions still was), and so she was banned from speaking for the rest of the Sessions debate.
The immediate result was the reverse of everything McConnell appeared to be trying to accomplish: Warren got a wave of positive publicity, the anti-Sessions Coretta Scott King letter she was reading to the Senate got far more attention than it otherwise would have, and McConnell's justification has become an iconic example of patriarchal arrogance: "She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted."
But there's something strange about this whole incident. It's odd that McConnell, ordinarily a cautious and canny politician, would make a move that backfired so badly, so quickly. And as many people have noted, McConnell then stayed silent when male Democrats continued reading the King letter. What did he think he was trying to accomplish?
We got a hint from a comment Trump made in a private meeting with Democratic senators: "Pocahontas is now the face of your party." That presents a weird possibility: Maybe McConnell was intentionally building Warren up:
"It's to Republicans’ benefit to elevate her as the voice for the Democratic Party, particularly heading into 2018," said GOP Strategist Brian Walsh, referring to the upcoming midterm elections in which Democrats will be defending seats in 10 states that Trump won. "Her views being taken as the mainstream of current Democratic thought would put her red state colleagues in a difficult situation."
Trump's invocation of his Pocahontas smear suggests that he foresees a 2020 repeat of the 2016 strategy, with Warren in the Clinton role: Over a period of years, gin up a bunch of bogus issues about a Democratic woman, then hope for an I-can't-vote-for-her reaction from otherwise wavering Republicans. So targeting Warren early and often would have a dual purpose: It would build up her negatives among Republican voters, while making Democrats more determined to nominate her.
Amanda Marcotte gives an alternative interpretation of what made the Coretta Scott King letter so threatening:
That letter angers Republicans, because in the years since Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, there’s been a conservative effort to remake King in their own image. Warren’s attempt to read the letter by King’s widow into the record served as an embarrassing reminder that King’s politics had nothing in common with modern conservatism.
Call it the “dead progressive” problem. Conservatives love a dead progressive hero, because they can claim that person as one of their own without any bother about the person fighting back. In some cases, the right has tried to weaponize these dead progressives, claiming that they would simply be appalled at how far the still-breathing have supposedly gone off the rails and become too radical. The Kings are just two prominent victims of this rhetorical gambit.
but we should be paying more attention to the Flynn scandal
Thursday night, The Washington Post opened a new chapter in the Putin/Trump story: After the election, but while Obama was still president, Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn appears to have interfered in foreign policy. Apparently he reassured the Russians that the moves Obama was taking to punish Russia for interfering in the U.S. elections would be reconsidered after Trump took office.
Previously, Flynn had denied that his conversations with the Russian ambassador had mentioned any sanctions, and Vice President Pence had backed him up on national TV. Now the WaPo claims to have "nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls" who say otherwise.
All of those officials said Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit. Two of those officials went further, saying that Flynn urged Russia not to overreact to the penalties being imposed by President Barack Obama, making clear that the two sides would be in position to review the matter after Trump was sworn in as president.
Flynn himself is now backing off of his blanket denial, and Trump and Pence are not commenting. If the scandal doesn't die down, the likely outcome is that Flynn will take the fall: He just went rogue, reassured the Russians on his own authority, and then lied to Pence about it.
But a far more disturbing possibility ought to be investigated: What if Flynn wasn't going rogue? What if the Trump campaign had an ongoing, long-standing relationship with Russia, and there was always some explicit quid-pro-quo promised in exchange for Russia's hacking of the Democrats? If true, that starts to sound like an impeachable offense.
and you might also be interested in
Some idiot in the College Republicans club of Central Michigan University thought it would be clever to distribute a Hitler-themed Valentine card, I guess because the Holocaust is so hilarious.
I'm not going to claim that this represents some universal-but-hidden anti-Semitism at the heart of the GOP, or even among CMU Republicans. Probably most Republicans find this card as repulsive as I do. But I think Romney-and-McCain Republicans need to connect this dot with the Heil-Trump Nazi video, the KKK endorsement, Milo Yiannopoulos, and a bunch of similar dots: There's a certain kind of racist asshole who feels very comfortable in your party these days. Whether they represent the majority or not, shouldn't that worry you?
BTW, this is the proper context in which to consider Trump's Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation, which somehow managed not to mention Jews. It was a wink to Holocaust deniers, Nazis, and other anti-Semites, who have become an important Trump constituency.
Now that Megyn Kelly has left Fox News, it's good to see that her replacement, Tucker Carlson, is holding the Trump administration to the highest possible standards. Say what you will about Steve Bannon, he's better than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi!
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I'm bemused by how qualified these categories are: used chemical weapons on Kurds, mass executions of Christians. It's as if Carlson wants to be covered in case Bannon unleashes chemical weapons on the Dutch or orders mass executions of Rastafarians.
The second SNL appearance of Melissa McCarthy as Sean Spicer is just as funny as the first. And Alec Baldwin's imitation of Trump got a rare compliment: A newspaper in the Dominican Republic published Baldwin's picture, apparently thinking it was Trump.
Thursday, in a phone conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump reaffirmed the United States' "One China policy" which formally recognizes Taiwan as a province of China while simultaneously supporting the island's practical independence. Prior to his inauguration, Trump had spoken on the phone to Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen -- something no president or president-elect had done in decades -- and later said that the U.S. should insist on concessions from China in exchange for continuing to recognize One China.
In the world of U.S./China diplomacy, every little nod and adjective is interpreted as portentous, so China-watchers have been buzzing about whether Thursday's "reversal" is a defeat for Trump, or convinces China that he is a "paper tiger".
My interpretation is that Trump says a lot of crap, and very little of it actually means anything. So if either Xi or Tsai attach any importance to those calls, they're fooling themselves. This lack of seriousness will come back to bite Trump eventually. Someday he'll have to blow something up in order to get China's attention, because by then everyone will be ignoring his words and symbolic actions.
From the beginning of his campaign until this moment, Trump has done his best to surround himself with a fog. (For example, the normal budget process would have him submitting an FY 2018 budget this month, and still no one has the faintest idea what to expect. He has raised expectations about tax cuts, an ObamaCare replacement, a big infrastructure project, increased military spending, protecting Social Security and Medicare, and balancing the budget. What in all that is real, and what is just smoke?) When you're a slippery businessman hoping to cheat everyone you deal with, a fog like that is useful. But you don't hold together coalitions and alliances that way, or get the long-term cooperation you sometimes need from rival powers like China.
Speaking of the soon-to-be-unveiled budget, this is a worthwhile graphic to keep in mind. (It seems to come from the CBO by way of Senator Ron Johnson, but I pulled it off Rand Paul's Facebook page.)
It's a good snapshot to keep bookmarked, because it points out what people really are proposing when they say they want substantial cuts in government spending. (In other words, you can't balance the budget by cutting foreign aid and the National Endowment for the Arts.) Most of the things people talk about cutting are down in the All Other category, and probably would be invisible if they were called out separately. The red bars are non-discretionary, i.e., entitlements and other payments mandated by law.
The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf has always considered liberal political correctness a bigger problem than I do: Most of the examples of "political correctness run wild" that I hear about either didn't happen exactly the way the complaint claims, or is nothing more than the dominant culture being forced to give respect to people and points of view it used to happily ignore.
But OK, let's grant for the sake of argument the conservative criticism that political correctness has this chilling effect on the national conversation that makes it much harder to discuss important issues. Is Trump actually undoing such political correctness, or just turning it around to serve conservative purposes?
Friedersdorf makes a good argument for the latter. Trump's conservative political correctness, for example, makes it impossible to talk about white supremacist terrorism, or right-wing terrorism of any kind. He can't criticize Vladimir Putin.
Trump displays all the flaws attributed to “Social Justice Warriors”—thin skinned, quick to take offense, a bullying presence on Twitter, aggressively disdainful of comedy that pokes fun at him, delighting in firing people—just without any attachment to social justice. On matters as grave as counterterrorism and as inconsequential as the size of crowds, Trump is more contemptuous of the truth, and as driven by what is politically correct, than any president of recent years. That shouldn’t bother those who only complained about political correctness as a cover for bigotry. But everyone who complained on principle, knowing a country cannot thrive when disconnected from reality, should demand better.
and let's close with an attempt to learn from failure
Cards Against Humanity analyzes "Why Our Super Bowl Ad Failed". Strangely, 30 seconds of the camera silently staring at a potato failed to build the brand.
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